In the latest AI war escalation, Elon Musk releases Chatbot code
Elon Musk brought the raw computer code behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot on Sunday, an escalation from one of the world’s richest men in a battle to control the future of AI
Grok, which is designed to provide snarky answers styled after the science fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product of xAI, the company Mr. Musk founded last year. Although xAI is an independent entity of X, the technology is integrated into the social media platform and trained on users’ posts. Users who subscribe to X’s premium features can ask Grok questions and receive answers.
By opening the code up for anyone to view and use – known as open sourcing – Musk waded further into a heated debate in the AI world over whether this could help make the technology more secure, or simply make it open to abuse.
Mr Musk, a self-proclaimed proponent of open sourcing, did the same with X’s recommendation algorithm last year but has not updated it since.
“There is still work to be done, but this platform is already by far the most transparent and in search of the truth (not a high bar, by the way),” said Musk. Posted Sunday in response to a comment about open sourcing X’s recommendation algorithm.
The move to open-source chatbot code is the latest salvo between Mr Musk and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which recently sued the mercurial billionaire for breaching his pledge to do the same. Mr Musk, who founded and helped fund OpenAI before leaving several years later, has argued that such an important technology should not be controlled solely by tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, which is a close partner of OpenAI.
OpenAI has said it will seek to dismiss the lawsuit.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
The controversy over open source generative AI – which can create realistic images and videos and mimic human text responses – has roiled the tech world over the past year following the explosion in the technology’s popularity. Silicon Valley is deeply divided over whether the encryption underlying AI should be publicly available, with some engineers arguing the powerful technology should be protected from intruders, while others insist the benefits of transparency outweigh the drawbacks.
By publishing his AI code, Musk placed himself firmly in the latter camp, a decision that could allow him to gain an edge over competitors who had a head start on developing the technology.
Publishing the code will allow other companies and independent software developers to adapt and reuse it when building their own chatbots and other AI systems. Meta, the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, has also made it open source AI technology, called LLaMA. Google and a prominent French start-up, Mistral, have also done open sourcing.
Last year, Mr Musk – who also owns In November, he said that investors in his $44 billion take-private deal for 25 percent interest in xAI.
Mr Musk has said no topic should be off limits to chatbots, criticizing companies that steer their technology to avoid controversy as “woke”.
“If an AI is programmed to pursue diversity at all costs, as Google Gemini was, then it will do everything in its power to achieve that outcome, including possibly even killing people,” Mr Musk said in a message on Friday.
But at least some of the attitudes around open sourcing are closely tied to business interests. Because OpenAI is the market leader and offers the most powerful and perhaps the most popular chatbot, it has little incentive to make its code open source.
Mr Musk and xAI, on the other hand, are playing catch-up and could help level the playing field by making their code open source and inviting others to improve the technology.
Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor of computer science at Arizona State University, has argued that open sourcing current AI technology is the safest approach. But he added that companies like xAI and Meta weren’t necessarily open sourcing the technology for that reason.
“Elon Musk and Yann LeCun are not the best messengers for this argument,” he said, referring to Meta’s chief AI scientist.