Grok becomes open source. But “how much” open source?

The struggle between the models of generative artificial intelligence is increasingly fierce, and in a world dominated by ChatGPT, Gemini And Copilot, Elon Musk is trying to stand out with Grok, the AI irreverent. And now open source (by the way, do you know what the best alternatives to ChatGPT are?).

In fact, Musk had announced it onMarch 11th and a week later xAI, his company engaged in the development of Grok, announced the release of the model.

But what exactly does it mean when a AI model becomes open source? The question seems trivial, but it is not. Most of the models that define themselves “open” they are not open source, but they allow you to modify only the weights, i.e. the pre-trained parameters, to refine the model on specific operations.

To be open sourcea model must allow access to others two aspects: The source code and, in an ideal world, i training data.

Llama 2 of Meta o Gem from Google are open models, meaning they allow you to change the weights.

Other models like Mistral 8x7B instead they are open sourceand then there are the models like Pythia or Bloom, which I am completely open sourceas they include training data and datasets.

xAI explains that he released under license Apache 2.0 a version of Grok that includes the “Base model weights and network architecture” of the “Mixture-of-Experts model of 314 billion parameters, Grok-1“. This model comes from a checkpoint last October and has not been fine-tuned”for any specific application, such as dialogue“.

What does this mean exactly? In practice the model is really open sourcebut not completely, as it is allowed to use commercial but the data used to train him. It also lacks connections to X to get real-time data.

At the moment if you want to use Grok you must be a subscriber to X, and in November 2023 xAI had written in a post that the chatbot is intended for uses related to the generation of code, at the writing creative and to answer to the questions.

However, those who tried it were not impressed. Really The Verge he wrote “Grok has no point in existing“.

This passage however has enormous importanceespecially at this time. Musk in fact he always declared that AI models should be open source and after founding OpenAI he dragged her in court for violating an original agreement that it would be open source.

This controversy also dragged on to X, when Musk announced the opening of Grok, with ChatGPT commenting and the billionaire wryly asking “Which part of OpenAI is really Open“.

Whether or not this will help make it stand out Grok compared to competitors, that will remain to be seen, but at the moment users who have accessed the code are enthusiastic about it. Here you can find the page on GitHub to test it.