Elon Musk’s xAI has made an older version of its AI model Grok – specifically, the model weights used to shape Grok 2.5 – available on the open source platform Hugging Face. TechCrunch reported.
“The @AI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source,” Musk wrote on X. He added that Grok 3 “will be made open source in about 6 months.”
AI engineer Tim Kellogg described the Grok license as “custom with some anti-competitive terms.”
Grok, which is prominently featured on X (which in turn recently merged with xAI), has created considerable controversy this year, particularly after the chatbot seemed to become obsessed with “white genocide” conspiracy theories, expressed skepticism about the Holocaust’s death toll, and described itself as “MechaHitler,” leading xAI to publish its system prompts on GitHub.
Engadget reported: Unhinged as Grok may be, it’s now open source. xAI’s CEO Elon Musk, posed on X that the company made the older Grok 2.5 model available to the public and will do the same with the upcoming Grok 3.
For now, anyone can download, run and even tweak Grok, whose source code was uploaded to the Hugging Face platform. However, there are restrictions to xAI’s open-source license, which doesn’t let people use Grok to train, create or improve other AI models.
It’s not the first time xAI has made models available to the public. In March 2024, the company released the raw base model of Grok-1, which isn’t fine-tuned for any specific task. As xAI continues to make Grok more accessible, it’s a stark contrast to OpenAI, which has only offered less powerful models of its ChatGPT model to researchers and businesses.
Making Grok open source allows independent developers to potentially improve on the AI model, but xAI is still trying to move past an extremely alarming episode of Grok providing antisemitic responses and referencing itself as “MechaHitler.”
The Decoder reported: xAI has released Grok 2 as an open model, including the weights. Elon Musk announced on X that Grok 2.5, xAI’s top model for 2024, is now open source. The weights for Grok 2 are available on Hugging Face. Musk also said Grok 3 will be released as open source in about six months.
Grok 2 is available under the xAI Community License. Usage is free for research and non-commercial projects, while commercial use must follow xAI’s guidelines. The license prohibits Grok 2 to develop or train other large AI models. If you redistribute the model, you have to credit the source and include “Powered by xAI.”