Elon Musk owned xAI startup has made its Grok-1 AI model available for researchers and developers on GitHub. Earlier, Musk through a post on X (formerly Twitter) announced that his artificial intelligence startup xAI would open-source its ChatGPT alternative Grok.
xAI said that the model available is “a raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023”. This essentially means that the model is not fine-tuned for a specific application.
The company has not entirely open-sourced grok but has opted for a more open-weight approach. Open-weight, unlike open-source, is not completely transparent but provides developers a pre-made mould on which they can build upon. Open-source models require comparatively more work on the developers front but enables more understanding and customisation options. There are many fully open-source models available such as Mistral and Falcon. However, according to a report by The Verge, the most widely used models are either closed-sourced or offer a limited open licence, such as Meta’s Llama 2.
Recently, Musk filed a lawsuit against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, stating that the company abandoned its original mission of creating open-source technology in favour of a for-profit model. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left three years later.
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