Elon Musk’s xAI is open sourcing its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok, which some believe could democratize AI technology and spur innovation in commercial applications. be.
The company is released Send Grok data to X Premium+ subscribers via GitHub and BitTorrent. The public release comes amid continued criticism of Musk. legal action Opposed to OpenAI’s AI model because it lacks transparency.
“Open source models can lead to increased competition and cost savings for companies looking to leverage AI in their operations.” Richard Gardnersaid the CEO of technology consultancy Modulus in an interview with PYMNTS. “As the underlying models become more accessible, the competition shifts to the quality of the data used to train the models and the expertise to apply those models to solve specific business problems. There is a possibility.”
Grok’s superiority
Announced in November, Grok is a ChatGPT-like AI assistant accessible to X Premium+ users who pay a $16 monthly subscription fee to the rebranded Twitter platform. At the core of Grok is a large language model called Grok-1, which boasts 314 billion parameters. To put this into perspective, his GPT-3 model in OpenAI had his 175 billion parameters. The number of parameters is a common indicator of the complexity of an AI model and suggests its potential to provide more sophisticated and relevant responses.
According to Gardner, open source AI allows for faster innovation and greater transparency than proprietary models developed by big tech companies. “Open source supports free speech and reduces the potential for censorship by big tech companies,” he said. It also makes AI more accessible to small businesses and startups that don’t have the resources to develop models from scratch.
Cloris Chen, CEO of an AI company cogitotold PYMNTS in an interview that the algorithms underlying models such as ChatGPT are well known in the research community, and that their core algorithms come from published research papers.
“AI engineers can collaborate on improvements more quickly by making their source code public, which inherently poses a threat to centralized AI providers,” Chen added.
But observers warned that open source AI has drawbacks and risks. Gardner said bias is perpetuated when open source language models are based on training data that reflects social biases, or have “excessive layers of adjustment” that problematically limit the model’s output. He pointed out that it is possible.
Some open source models also have potential security concerns. “Many models on platforms like HuggingFace, for example, have backdoors that can write files or execute code in ways you didn’t intend,” Gardner explained.
Additionally, Gardner notes that fine-tuning open source language models for specific applications can still require large amounts of computational resources, making it difficult for some organizations considering adopting the technology. pointed out that this could be a barrier.
Efforts to open source Grok begin after Musk’s legal team I started recently The legal proceedings against OpenAI allege that the artificial intelligence company has strayed from its original purpose of developing AI to benefit humanity.
According to the complaint, OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman approached Musk in 2015 to focus on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the betterment of humanity. We requested cooperation in establishing a non-profit organization.
“OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to claim that its mission is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all humanity,'” the complaint states. But in reality, OpenAI, Inc. has turned into a closed-source company that essentially functions as a subsidiary of Microsoft, the world’s largest technology company. ”
Democratization of AI?
Open source AI has the potential to democratize the field and enable a wider range of users and organizations to benefit from the technology, said Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director. Information Technology Research Groupsaid in an interview with PYMNTS.
“A few years ago, the use of AI was very expensive and limited to companies with large budgets and research resources,” says Bellamkonda. “When companies like Google open sourced his Transformer model, the applicability of AI expanded. Cost reductions made it possible to leverage AI in startup SaaS. [software-as-a-service] company. “
Bellamkonda pointed out that open source AI has the potential to expand the range of situations in which the technology can be used. “Open source allows for community contributions and faster development,” he added.
“We are excited that X.ai’s Grok recently became open source. Through Grok’s access to real-time user-generated content from X.com, you can learn in real time. By using open source models, we can increase the diversity of AI use cases.”
