Elon Musk Says xAI Will Open Source Grok 2 Chatbot

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

In a post on X, Musk wrote, “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 after OpenAI launched two new open-weight AI reasoning models — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. These were trained on a text-only dataset which in addition to general knowledge, focused on science, math and coding knowledge.

Open-weight language models are different from open-source models, which provide access to the complete source code, training data and methodologies.

In October 2024, Musk had committed to open source previous version of xAI’s models. “As we create the next version, we open source the prior version, as we did with Grok 1 when Grok 2 was released,” he said at that time.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, which initially embraced open-sourced its work, shifted to a closed-source stance, which helped drive its commercial success.

However, CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged the shift, saying the company had been “on the wrong side of history and need to figure out a different open source strategy.”