Madiha Yaqoob
Grok the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence business xAI is about to take a risk by being made publicly available. This week Grok a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT will be made accessible to the general public. This happened not long after Elon Musk sued OpenAI claiming that the Microsoft backed business had abandoned its open source roots.
Grok was introduced by xAI last year, equipped with features that provide access to real-time information and offer alternative viewpoints that challenge the politically correct approach. Customers with a subscription to xAI’s $16 monthly plan can use the service.
Along with Sam Altman Musk co founded OpenAI with the original intention of balancing Google hegemony in the artificial intelligence space. But OpenAI course changed and it adopted a closed source business model putting Microsoft financial success first. Musk’s legal action aims to address this deviation from the original commitment to freely available technology.
The lawsuit has sparked discussions among technologists and investors regarding the merits of open-source AI. Early OpenAI supporter Vinod Khosla sees Musk legal action as a distraction from the ultimate objective of establishing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The co founder of Andreessen Horowitz Marc Andreessen responded by accusing Khosla of advocating against open source AI research. Andreessen emphasized that groundbreaking technologies often face unwarranted moral panic, and the current situation is no exception.
By open-sourcing Grok, xAI joins a growing list of companies, including Meta and the French startup Mistral, that have shared their chatbot code with the public.
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Musk’s commitment to open-source principles extends beyond xAI. At Tesla, another company he leads, many patents have been made freely available. Musk stated in 2014 that Tesla would refrain from initiating patent lawsuits against those who genuinely seek to use their technology. X, formerly known as Twitter, also aligns with this ethos.
