Elon Musk has announced that xAI, his AI company, will open source its Grok 2 chatbot next week.
He made the statement on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, early Wednesday morning.
In his words: “It’s high time we open-sourced Grok 2. Will make it happen next week. We’ve just been fighting fires and burning the 4 am oil nonstop for a while now.”
This places xAI in contrast with other major AI companies that are adopting more closed-source strategies.
Open Source
When a model is open source, developers receive full access to the codebase, training data, and development methods.
In short, they get the blueprint. This allows researchers and developers to study, adapt, and improve the model.
Grok 2 will be released under these terms. This is different from what OpenAI announced this week.
OpenAI launched two new AI models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, but only made the weights available.
These are “open-weight” models, not open-source ones. Their internal training processes and code remain closed to the public.
A Promise
In October 2024, he made a commitment: each time xAI releases a new model, the previous version will become open source.
He kept that promise with Grok 1. Now, he’s doing the same with Grok 2. This approach supports innovation across the wider tech community.
It also reflects Musk’s belief that powerful AI models should not remain behind corporate firewalls.
OpenAI
Notably, this announcement follows OpenAI’s decision to release its new models with limited access.
OpenAI, once a leader in AI openness, has shifted towards a more commercial focus in recent years.
Its paid APIs and proprietary tools now support a growing number of business applications.
However, the company’s leadership appears to have mixed feelings about this change.
Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the company had been “on the wrong side of history” regarding open-source AI development.
Grok 2
Grok is xAI’s conversational AI model. Its name, drawn from science fiction, means “to understand deeply.”
The first version of Grok earned attention for its conversational ability and reasoning skills. Grok 2 builds on that foundation with improvements in logic, memory, and context handling.
The open release will allow others to study and improve the model. It will also create opportunities for developers to build tools, applications, and research projects using Grok’s architecture.
