Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence startup xAI would open-source its ChatGPT challenger “Grok” this week, days after he sued OpenAI for abandoning its original mission in favor of a for-profit model.
The billionaire has warned on several occasions against the
use of technology for profit by big technology companies such as Google.
He filed the lawsuit against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which
he co-founded in 2015 but left three years later, earlier this month. In
response, OpenAI publicized emails that showed the Tesla CEO supported a plan
to create a for-profit entity and wanted a merger with the EV maker to make the
combined company a “cash cow.”
“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk said in a post
on X, the social media firm he owns.
The move could give the public free access to experiment
with the code behind the technology and aligns xAI with firms such as Meta and
France’s Mistral, both of which have open-source AI models.
Google has also released an AI model called Gemma that
outside developers can potentially fashion according to their needs.
Tech investors including OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla and Marc
Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have been
debating about open-sourcing in AI since Musk filed the lawsuit against the
ChatGPT maker.
While open-sourcing technology can help speed up
innovations, some experts have warned that open-source AI models could be used
by terrorists to create chemical weapons or even develop a conscious
super-intelligence beyond human control.
Musk said at Britain’s AI Safety Summit last year that he
wanted to establish a “third-party referee” that could oversee firms developing
AI and sound the alarm if they have concerns.
Seeking an
alternative to OpenAI and Google, Musk launched xAI last year to create what he
said would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI”. In December, the startup rolled out
Grok for Premium+ subscribers of X.
In a podcast episode with computer scientist and podcaster
Lex Fridman, Musk suggested in November that he favored the concept of
open-source AI.
“The name, the open in open AI, is supposed to mean open
source, and it was created as a nonprofit open source. And now it is a closed
source for maximum profit,” Musk had said.