Elon Musk’s venture, xAI, has released the Grok-1 AI model’s code and weights, surpassing OpenAI’s GPT-3 by some 150 billion parameters. The release on GitHub and BitTorrent allows worldwide access to the Grok-1’s 314 billion parameters, promoting democratic access to sophisticated large language model (LLM) technology. The unrefined version of Grok-1 is available for any form of innovation, including commercial uses.
Naturally, Elon Musk couldn’t miss an opportunity to tease OpenAI, commenting, “Tell us more about the “Open” part of OpenAI …” This is in the middle of a legal battle and discussion between Musk and OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, over OpenAI’s shift from being a non-profit open-source research company to a profit-making subsidiary of Microsoft.
Grok-1, though, isn’t immediately applicable for conversational AI systems as it doesn’t yet have specific instructions or datasets calibrated to razor-sharp dialogue systems performance. This implies that further effort and resources are necessary to harness Grok-1 for such tasks, creating a potential hurdle for those in the field of conversational AI. Also, the significant size of the model’s weights, a hefty 296GB, means that running the model requires substantial computational resources, including top-tier datacenter-class hardware. On the other hand, the AI community is excited about the prospect of optimizing Grok-1 through quantization, which could lessen the model’s computational demands and size.
Importantly, Grok-1 is genuinely open-source, with xAI opting for an Apache 2.0 license, synonymous with Mistral’s 7B model. Unlike some licenses that impose more limiting terms on the software’s usage and distribution, the Apache 2.0 license allows for extensive freedom in how the software can be modified, used, and distributed. This includes commercial exploits, making Grok-1 highly attractive to individuals or businesses looking to build upon or integrate the model into their own services or products.
Such progressive steps of making Grok-1’s architecture and weights freely available further Musk’s concept of open AI while challenging the broader AI community. Open-source models that are viable pose a threat to revenue for closed-source developers like OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI has likely been unnerved by the ongoing developments from Google, Anthropic, and now xAI. The AI community is preparing for an expected GPT-5 or Sora release, which might change the power dynamics yet again.
