Elon Musk Takes Another Dig At OpenAI By Making xAI’s Grok Chatbot Open-Source

Elon Musk’s relationship with Sam Altman and his company OpenAI has been quite strained after Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for digressing from its original mission.

Adding fuel to the issue, Elon Musk has now announced that Grok will be open-source. He took to his X account and shared a post saying “This week, @xAI will open-source Grok”

Making it open-source basically means that users will be allowed to check and experiment with the backend code of the platform for free. This makes the tool extremely transparent and therefore super reliable. However, we are yet to find out what elements of the platform will be made open-source.

Grok is an AI chatbot, a lot like ChatGPT but much more advanced in every sense. For instance, it can access information in real time – and it can also solve much harder questions and simplify tasks like incident prediction and root cause analysis.

Read More: Elon Musk set to create A dedicated Smart TV app For X

Starting From The Beginning: What Exactly Happened?

Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and was one of its biggest investors. In 2018, he decided to step down from the company while continuing to support it and invest in it. However, earlier this month, he filed a lawsuit against the company saying that OpenAI had forgotten its original mission.

Elon Musk was also unhappy about Microsoft’s growing influence on OpenAI and claimed it didn’t have any right on GPT-4 (the latest language model created by OpenAI).

He also expressed concerns several times over the potential misuse of AI – and he feels that companies like OpenAI simply add to it. His concerns are valid, too. In a recent series of tests, OpenAI, along with other AI chatbots was found to be extremely racist despite anti-racism training. This, combined with the AI companies’ lack of transparency, is why AI researchers want to conduct safety audits on AI firms.

In fact, one of the main reasons why Musk launched his own AI chatbot was to combat these commercially driven companies. In his words, he wanted an AI platform that would seek “the maximum truth”

For the same reasons, he also talked about the need for a “third-party referee” that would oversee the functioning of AI firms at Britain’s AI Safety Summit last year.

Read More: OpenAI gets a new board of directors, Sam Altman reinstated

What Did OpenAI Say In Response?

Ever since Musk filed the lawsuit, multiple tech investors including Vinod Khosla (who backs OpenAI) have been talking about the implications of making AI platforms open-source.

Although doing so will foster innovation, some experts are afraid that it’ll make things easier for terrorists who wish to exploit such tools. And, given that AI tools are extremely powerful, it’ll be a risky maneuver.