xAI has published parts of the Grok 2.5 code online and plans to do the same for Grok 3 in six months.
Elon Musk has released parts of the Grok AI model under an open-source license, a move aimed at boosting developer adoption and user interest while narrowing the gap with rivals such as OpenAI and Google.
Musk announced in an X post on Friday that xAI, his AI company, which also houses the X social media site, has published parts of the source code for Grok 2.5 on code-sharing platform Hugging Face. Grok 3 “will be made open source in about 6 months,” he added.
To be sure, xAI has released the Grok 2.5 model weight and code under a limited license, which limits usage to non-commercial and research purposes only.
In doing so, Musk, a new entrant in the AI race, has taken a leaf out of the playbook of Meta and Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba and DeepSeek.
The release of AI model source code, albeit with restrictions, has accelerated the development of new applications and services built on top of them, while also positioning these companies as champions of more equitable AI advancement.
Grok debuted as an AI chatbot on X in 2023, with a standalone Grok app released in January this year. In terms of users, it is way behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini services. xAI released Grok 4 in July, which is currently available to certain premium X and Grok app users.
Even as Musk doubles down on promoting his AI offering (while also engaging in online disputes with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman), Grok has had its share of controversies.
Months ago, users had flagged that the chatbot seemed to become obsessed with “white genocide” conspiracy theories, and also expressed skepticism about the Holocaust’s death toll, among other hallucinations.
However, Musk has been aggressively promoting the updated Grok versions on his X feed, touting its ability to produce images and turn pictures into animations on prompt. He has also proposed that Tesla shareholders vote on investing in xAI.
Founded in early 2023 after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI later merged with social platform X (owned by Musk) in a deal that valued it at $80 billion.
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