Billionaire Elon Musk has announced that his artificial intelligence firm, xAI, will be releasing open-source chatbot Grok this week. The chatbot will be competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Elon Musk recently sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming they had abandoned the original mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity instead of profit.
xAI’s Grok, which was released last year, provides access to “real-time” information for customers who pay a $16 monthly subscription on X (formerly Twitter), according to TechCrunch.
Elon Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI, which was established to counterbalance Google. However, Musk has alleged that OpenAI violated its promise to make its technology available to the public for free, became a closed source, and instead prioritized maximizing profits for Microsoft. This claim was made by Musk in a lawsuit filed at the end of last month.
The lawsuit triggered a debate among tech and investor communities about the benefits of open-source AI.
The release of Grok as open-source code means xAI will join a growing list of companies, such as Meta and French startup Mistral, that have made their chatbot code available to the public.
Billionaire Elon Musk has always been a proponent of open-source technology. Even the company he leads, Tesla, has released many of its patents as open source. Musk declared in 2014 that “Tesla will not file patent lawsuits against anyone who in good faith wants to use our technology.” Additionally, the social network X has also made some of its algorithms open source. It’s worth noting that this information doesn’t relate to any math you may have done last year.
