Elon Musk opens source Grok Chatbot in the latest escalation of the AI ​​war

Elon Musk released Raw computer code Behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot on Sunday, an escalation by one of the world's richest men in a battle to control the future of artificial intelligence.

Grok, designed to deliver scathing responses in the style of the science fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product of xAI, the company Mr. Musk founded last year. While xAI is an independent entity from X, its technology is integrated into the social media platform and is trained on users' posts. Users who subscribe to premium X features can ask Grok questions and receive answers.

By opening up the code for everyone to view and use — known as open source — Mr. Musk has waded further into a heated debate in the world of artificial intelligence about whether doing so could help make the technology safer, or simply expose it to abuse.

Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed proponent of open source, did the same thing with X's recommendation algorithm last year, but has not updated it since.

“There is still work to do, but this platform is already the most transparent and truth-seeking (and not a high bar),” Mr. Musk said. to publish on Sunday in response to a comment about the open source recommendation algorithm X.

The move to open source chatbot code is the latest clash between Mr Musk and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which the mercurial billionaire recently sued for violating his promise to do the same. Mr. Musk, who was a founder and helped fund OpenAI before leaving after several years, said such important technology should not be controlled solely by tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which is a close partner of OpenAI.

OpenAI said it will seek to dismiss the lawsuit.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems.)

The controversy surrounding open-source generative AI — which can create photo-realistic photos and videos and recreate human-like text responses — has roiled the tech world over the past year following the technology's explosion in popularity. Silicon Valley is deeply divided over whether the underlying coding of artificial intelligence should be publicly available, with some engineers arguing that powerful technology should be protected against hackers, and others insisting that the benefits of transparency outweigh its harms.

By deploying his own AI code, Mr. Musk has firmly planted himself in the latter camp, a decision that could enable him to leapfrog competitors who have had a head start in developing the technology.

Publishing the code will allow other companies and independent software developers to modify and reuse it as they build their own chatbots and other AI systems. Meta, the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, has also open-sourced it Artificial intelligence technology, called LLaMA. Google and a prominent French startup, Mistral, have also done some open sourcing.

Last year, Mr. Musk — who also owns X and SpaceX and is CEO of Tesla — founded xAI, citing its mission as “understanding reality.” In November, he said investors in his $44 billion private deal for X would own 25 percent share In xAI.

Mr Musk said no topic should be off-limits to chatbots, criticizing companies that direct their technology to avoid controversy as “woke”.

“If AI is programmed to push for diversity at all costs, as happened with Google Gemini, it will do everything in its power to cause that outcome, perhaps even killing people,” Musk said in his statements. Friday post.

But at least some positions on open source are closely tied to commercial interests. Since OpenAI is the market leader, offering the most powerful and popular chatbots, it has little reason to open source its code.

On the other hand, Mr. Musk and xAI are playing catch-up and can help level the playing field by open-sourcing their code and inviting others to improve the technology.

Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University, sees open source for today's AI technology as the most secure approach. But he added that companies like xAI and Meta weren't necessarily making the technology open source for this reason.

“Elon Musk and Yan Licon are not the best reporters for this argument,” he said, referring to Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist.