(New York) Elon Musk announced Monday that his start-up xAI would make, this week, free access (open source) the computer program on which his generative artificial intelligence (AI) interface Grok is based.
The decision was interpreted by many observers as a new blow to OpenAI, the start-up he co-founded before leaving in 2018.
Elon Musk took legal action in California at the beginning of March for violation of OpenAI’s statutes by its managers.
The entrepreneur criticizes them for having adopted a commercial logic when the start-up was initially a non-profit company.
Elon Musk’s lawyers argue in particular that OpenAI has “ [rompu] the initial contract” by refusing to publish the code of its latest language model, GPT-4, an AI interface that allows content to be generated on simple request in everyday language.
The billionaire formalized the creation of xAI at the beginning of July, after recruiting computer scientists from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.
xAI unveiled its Grok conversational robot in November. It is intended to be a version whose responses can contain humorous traits.
In addition to Elon Musk’s start-up, other leading players in generative AI have focused on free access to the programming code of their models, also called “open source”.
This is the case of Meta with its Llama 2 language model, of Google with Gemma or of the young French start-up Mistral AI.