Grok is now open-source

Last week, Elon Musk stated that the AI model behind Grok, X’s chatbot, will be made open source. Well, it appears that the eccentric billionaire was not lying. As of Monday, Grok-1 is now an open-source AI model.

We’re not 100% certain if this was the master plan all along, or if this was just Elon Musk trying to point fingers at OpenAI. Currently, Elon Musk is in the process of suing OpenAI for violating its original purpose of being an open artificial intelligence company. The code to ChatGPT sits behind closed doors. Not only that, but Elon Musk feels that OpenAI is basically a de facto subsidiary of the largest company in the world, Microsoft. So, OpenAI and Elon Musk are battling this out in court as we speak.

Grok is now open source

The battle between open source and closed source continues. AI models like Gemini, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Apple’s AI models, Etc. are all closed off. This means that future development of these models relies only on the companies producing them, and they’re not open to any outside influence. However, there are plenty of open-source AI models out there that people can use for their needs.

Grok is now among them. If you’re a person who wants to use the Grok AI model for whatever reason, it’s available today. You can access this through the official GitHub. The model is called Grok-1, and it uses the Apache 2.0 license. If you’re planning on using Grok-1 for any sort of product or commercial use, then you’ll want to read the Apache 2.0 license information. It tells you what you can and can’t do with The Grok-1.

The GitHub repository contains everything you need to use this 341 billion “mixture-of-experts model.” In the official announcement post, it states that Grok-1 was not fine-tuned for any particular task. So, it’s a very general model. You’ll be using the raw base model checkpoint from October 2023.