Elon Musk’s xAI has officially open-sourced its AI chatbot Grok, which is now available on GitHub. The release includes the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1: a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, under the Apache 2.0 license, which enables commercial use but does not include the data used to train it or connections to X for real-time data. (I started working with it this weekend. I’ll write a review in a week or so.)

Elon Musk, who was a founder of OpenAI but later criticized it for moving away from its original open-source ethos, has been a vocal advocate for open-sourcing AI technologies as a counterbalance to big tech’s proprietary approach.

The decision to open-source Grok aligns with Elon’s broader vision for AI, which includes understanding the true nature of the universe and ensuring AI development is aligned with human safety and ethics. If you remember, Elon had a pretty public falling out with Google co-founder Larry Page about the risks of AI. The spat ended with Page calling Elon a “speciesist.”

On a related topic: The title of my Sunday essay, Unlocking the Power of AI for Brand Marketers: The Benefits of Fine-Tuning, RAG, and Transfer Learning, maybe a bit jargony, but the subject is anything but. It explores three techniques for gaining a competitive edge by combining your data with AI.

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