In latest AI war escalation, Elon Musk releases chatbot code

SAN FRANCISCO – Elon Musk released the raw computer code behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot Sunday, an escalation by one of the world’s richest men in a battle to control the future of AI.

Grok, which is designed to give snarky replies styled after the science-fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product from xAI, the company Musk founded last year. While xAI is an independent entity from X, its technology has been integrated into the social media platform and is trained on users’ posts. Users who subscribe to X’s premium features can ask Grok questions and receive responses.

By opening the code up for everyone to view and use – known as open sourcing – Musk waded further into a heated debate in the AI world over whether doing so could help make the technology safer, or simply open it up to misuse.

The move is the latest volley between Musk and ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, which the mercurial billionaire sued recently over breaking its promise to do the same. Musk, who was a founder and helped fund OpenAI before departing several years later, has argued such an important technology should not be controlled solely by tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which is a close partner of OpenAI.

OpenAI has said it will seek to dismiss the suit.

The controversy over open sourcing generative AI has roiled the tech world over the past year after the explosion in the popularity of the technology. Silicon Valley is deeply divided over whether the coding underlying AI should be publicly available, with some engineers arguing that the powerful technology must be guarded against interlopers while others insist that the benefits of transparency outweigh the harms.

By publishing his AI code, Musk planted himself firmly in the latter camp, a decision that could enable him to leapfrog competitors who have had a head start in developing the technology.

The publication of the code will allow other companies and independent software developers to modify and reuse it as they build their own chatbots and other AI systems.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.