Elon Musk has announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI, will release the full source code of its Grok 2 chatbot model next week. The statement was made on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), where Musk said, “It’s high time we open-sourced Grok 2. Will make it happen next week”. This means that xAI will make the entire model (including its code and trained weights) available to the public. The move allows developers, researchers, and anyone interested to access, study, and even build on the model for their own use.
Grok 2 is part of xAI’s series of large language models (LLMs), designed to work similarly to other popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. It can understand and generate human-like text, answer questions, and help users with a variety of tasks. The Grok chatbot is already integrated into X, where it can provide real-time answers and interact with users. xAI describes Grok as having a more humorous and sometimes politically incorrect (but yet factually true) style compared to other AI models.
The decision to open source Grok 2 is part of a pattern Musk has been following since the launch of Grok 1 (or ‘Grok’) in November 2023. When Grok 2 was released in August 2024, the company made Grok 1 open source. And now, with newer models like Grok 3 and Grok 4 already in use, Musk is continuing that trend by preparing to release Grok 2 to the public. Notably, last month, the company launched ‘Grok 4 Heavy’ alongside Grok 4, as well as a new $300/month ‘SuperGrok Heavy’ subscription plan. Grok 4 Heavy uses a unique architecture that runs multiple AI agents working together like a team, enabling it to deliver more accurate and thoughtful responses in complex reasoning tasks.
The latest announcement also comes shortly after OpenAI released new ‘open-weight’ models called gpt-oss-120B and gpt-oss-20B. However, the ChatGPT maker only provided the trained weights for those models, not the code or training data. On the other hand, xAI’s approach with Grok 2 is to release everything, like the code, the architecture, and trained parameters.
Earlier, Musk has said that he believes AI models should be open to the public, rather than controlled by a small number of companies. Meanwhile, the exact release date and licensing terms for Grok 2 have not been confirmed yet, but based on xAI’s previous release of Grok 1, it is likely the model will be made available on a platform like GitHub under a license like Apache 2.0. This would allow users to modify and reuse the model even for commercial purposes.
The timing of this latest move becomes notable as xAI is reportedly planning to raise $12 billion to develop custom AI chips and build supercomputers. But despite all these efforts, the Grok chatbot has not been free from controversies. Most recently, xAI’s new text-to-video tool, Grok Imagine, faced criticism for its ‘spicy mode’ setting, which reportedly allows the generation of explicit content, including nudity. Earlier, Grok’s AI companions (Ani and Valentine) were also criticized following reports of sexually explicit interactions. Additionally, the Grok chatbot sparked outrage after generating antisemitic messages that praised Adolf Hitler and referred to itself as ‘MechaHitler’.
