Hello my followers! Today I have some exciting news to share with you. xAI has open sourced its AI chatbot Grok, allowing researchers and developers to build on the model and impact how xAI updates Grok in the future.

A company blog post reveals that this open release includes the base model weights and network architecture of the 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1. It is being released under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling commercial use without including the data used to train it or connections to X for real-time data.

After Elon Musk purchased Twitter (now X), the code behind its algorithms was eventually released, following Musk’s criticism of companies that do not open-source their AI models. This move puts xAI in direct competition with tech giants like OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

Open-sourcing AI models is becoming more common as companies seek feedback from researchers to improve their technology. While some fully open-source AI foundation models exist, many widely used models are either closed-sourced or offer limited open licenses.

When Grok chatbot first launched, it required an X subscription. Marketed as a more irreverent alternative to other chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, early testing revealed that Grok lacked the humor and sophistication of its competitors.