Elon Musk announced on March 11th that xAI would release its AI chatbot Grok as an open-source project. The open release is now available on GitHub, allowing researchers and developers to build upon the model. This move aims to impact the future updates of Grok as it competes with rival technologies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others. According to a company blog post, the open release includes the "base model weights and network architecture" of Grok-1, which is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model. However, it should be noted that this model checkpoint is from October and has not undergone fine-tuning for specific applications such as dialogue. VentureBeat reports that the open release is licensed under Apache 2. 0, enabling commercial use. However, it does not include the training data or real-time data connections to xAI.

In November 2023, xAI mentioned that the LLM Grok was developed over the last four months and is primarily targeted for coding generation, creative writing, and answering questions. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, now X, resulted in the eventual release of the underlying code of its algorithms. Musk has been vocal in criticizing companies that do not open-source their AI models, including OpenAI, which he co-founded. A lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI, alleging a breach of the original founding agreement that stated the company would be open source. Several companies have released open-source or limited open-source models to gather feedback from researchers for improvement. While there are fully open-source AI foundation models like Mistral and Falcon, the widely used models are usually closed-sourced or offer limited open licenses. Meta's Llama 2, for instance, provides its research for free but charges a fee to customers with 700 million daily users and doesn't allow developers to iterate on top of the Llama 2 model.