Elon Musk says xAI will open source Grok 2 chatbot

Billionaire Elon Musk said on Wednesday that his artificial intelligence startup xAI will open-source its chatbot, Grok 2, next week.

Taking to X, he said, “It’s high time we open sourced Grok 2. Will make it happen next week. We’ve just been fighting fires and burning the 4am oil nonstop for a while now.”



His comments came as OpenAI launched two new open-weight AI reasoning models. However, these models are not open-source models.

The new models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, have only the trained parameters or weights publicly available. Open-source models, however, include access to the full training data, source code, and development methods.

Musk had promised to open-source its models back in October 2024.

At the time, he wrote, “As we create the next version, we open source the prior version, as we did with Grok 1 when Grok 2 was released.”

On the other hand, OpenAI’s earlier years saw it lean towards open-sourcing its work, but the company has since largely adopted a closed-source approach. This strategy has supported the growth of its commercial offerings, including paid API access for businesses and developers.

However, earlier this year, CEO Sam Altman admitted that his company has been “on the wrong side of history” when it comes to open-sourcing its technology.