On February 29, Elon Musk sued OpenAI saying they broke their original deal from when OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit.
He believes OpenAI’s business deal with Microsoft doesn’t fit with OpenAI’s initial goal to develop open-source intelligence that helps everyone.
Microsoft had put almost $3 billion into OpenAI by late 2023.
In his lawsuit, Musk wants OpenAI to stick to its original open-source mission and asks the court to stop them from making money off this advanced technology. But shortly after he sued, OpenAI’s leaders showed some emails from Musk that seemed to support OpenAI becoming a profit-making company.
In response to that, Elon Musk said on X on March 11 that xAI plans to release its AI model Grok as open source, amidst legal action against competitor OpenAI, the developer of a rival AI chatbot.
Musk announced that Grok would become open source starting this week.
After the lawsuit started, OpenAI brought back Sam Altman to its board. He was briefly let go and then rehired in November 2023, which the board later admitted was a mistake that upset the company’s balance.
Elon Musk’s move to share Grok for free is like what he’s asking for in his lawsuit with OpenAI—to share advanced AI for everyone’s good.
Grok, made by Musk’s xAI, is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But Grok is different because it can pull in fresh information from the X social media and tackle tough questions that other AIs might not.
To use Grok, you need to be a verified X user. When people compare it, they say Grok is better than ChatGPT-3.5 but not quite as good as OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4.
On March 11, He further extended his criticism of the Altman-led firm, saying . “Open AI is a lie”