In a surprise move, Elon Mush announced that Grok will be open-sourced.
Elon Musk recently filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for not being “open” anymore. I covered this earlier this month, and why Grok is comparatively irrelevant among its peers. As the feud continues, he recently announced that Grok will be open-sourced. This is a major move. Now, Grok isn’t competing with the likes of Gemini and ChatGPT directly, but Meta’s Llama and Mistral instead. Also, his AI company (xAI) has big plans for Grok. It will get a larger context window, for once. Bigger context windows seem to be the next big thing for AI tools.
He even said that “OpenAI is a lie” to a commenter who said “OpenAI should do the same. If they are “open” that is.” The full picture is a little different. It was Musk’s withdrawal from OpenAI that forced the company’s hand to seek private funding, making it “closed.” Musk’s lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s GPT-4 is already AGI-level and Microsoft shouldn’t have access to that anymore; and that by now, OpenAI is just a puppet company working to make bigger profits for Microsoft.
Open-sourcing an LLM model isn’t exactly about making everything available. It remains to be seen what exactly becomes available for developers to tweak with. In all likelihood, Musk is going to open source the code and possibly also the dataset, meaning developers can access and use it just like they use, let’s say, Falcon, Mixtral, or Llama 2. But the product called Grok will remain tied to the Twitter Premium+ subscription of $16/month compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus subscription of $20/month.
