xAI announced the open release of Grok-1, a large language model with 314 billion parameters, yesterday (17 March) in a blog post after Musk announced plans last week to open-source the model.

The model’s weights and architecture have been released under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling commercial use but excluding the training data and real-time data connections.

Elon Musk’s decision to open-source Grok-Musk follows his criticism of companies like OpenAI for not making the code for their AI models freely available.

“OpenAI was created as an open-source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” Musk said in a post on X, last year.

The debate around open-source AI models remains divided. Some experts fear that making the technology’s code accessible to the public will make it easier for terrorists or bad actors to utilise AI for malicious purposes.

Grok-1’s release contrasts with closed-source models like Meta’s Llama 2, which offers limited open licenses. Notable fully open-source models include Mistral and Falcon.

Prior to the release, access to Grok was limited to subscribers of the X social network. The open-source model does not include connections to the social network.