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, âItâs high time we open-sourced Grok 2. Will make it happen next weekâ. 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 xAIâs series of large language models (LLMs), designed to work similarly to other popular chatbots like OpenAIâs ChatGPT or Googleâs 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 âGrokâ) 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 âGrok 4 Heavyâ alongside Grok 4, as well as a new $300/month âSuperGrok Heavyâ 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 âopen-weightâ 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, xAIâs 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 xAIâs 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, xAIâs new text-to-video tool, Grok Imagine, faced criticism for its âspicy modeâ setting, which reportedly allows the generation of explicit content, including nudity. Earlier, Grokâs 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 âMechaHitlerâ.
The Tech Portal is published by Blue Box Media Private Limited. Our investors have no influence over our reporting. Read our full Ownership and Funding Disclosure â
Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutoshâs career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
