xAI Open Source Grok – The Verge

March 11 Elon Musk said xAI plans to open source its AI chatbot Grok, and the public release is now available on GitHub. This will allow researchers and developers, based on their models, to influence how xAI updates Grok in the future, competing against competing technologies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others.

A company blog post explains that this public release includes the “base model weights and network architecture” of the “314 billion parameter expert mixture model Grok-1.” It goes on to say that the model comes from Checkpoint last October and has not been fine-tuned “for specific applications, such as chat.”

like venture beat Note that although it is released under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows commercial use, it does not include X connectivity for data used for training or real-time data. xAI said in a November 2023 post that LLM Grok has been “developed over the past four months” and is aimed at uses related to coding creation, creative writing, and question answering.

After Musk acquired Twitter (now known as This includes OpenAI, which he helped found but is now suing, claiming the company violated its original founding agreement that it would be open source.

Companies have released open source or limited open source models to get feedback from other researchers on how to improve. There are many fully open source AI-based models, such as Mistral and Falcon, but the most widely used models are either closed source or offer limited open licenses. For example, Meta’s Llama 2 makes its research available for free, but with 700 million daily users, customers pay a fee and developers can’t iterate on top of Llama 2.