Elon Musk on Monday announced that his artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, will be shutting down its chatbot Grok after he sued OpenAI earlier this month for straying from its original mission and failing to remain open source. They announced that they would open source it.
“This week, @xAI is open sourcing Grok,” Musk said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, sued the company, CEO Sam Altman, and co-founder Greg Brockman for breach of contract for breaking OpenAI's founding agreement to partner with Microsoft. filed a lawsuit.
Musk, Altman and Brockman agreed to form the AI company as a nonprofit organization to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity and to keep it open source, Musk said. That's what it means.
Instead, Musk said that OpenAI is currently developing and refining AGI “to maximize Microsoft's profits,” and that the latest AI models are being developed “to serve Microsoft's proprietary commercial interests.” The company has refused to provide details about its internal design.
But OpenAI hit back at Musk last week, claiming that he supports turning the company into a for-profit company and that he “wants a merger with Tesla” or “wants full control.”
“We were unable to reach a commercial agreement with Elon because we felt it was inconsistent with our mission for individuals to have complete control over OpenAI,” the company said in a blog post.
OpenAI also pointed to an email that OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Satskeva sent to Musk in 2016, to which Musk agreed, in which he said, “This mission means open sourcing AGI.'' I understood that this was not the case,” he said.
“It makes sense that as we get closer to building AI, we start to become less open,” Sutskever wrote at the time. “OpenAI's openness means that once the AI is built, everyone should benefit from the work, but it's perfectly fine not to share the science.”
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.