Elon Musk’s xAI and OpenAI go Meta’s way, to give away tech behind AI chatbots

Elon Musk’s xAI and OpenAI seem to be going in the same direction. Both the AI companies have announced open-sourcing their advanced AI models. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the release of two new open-weight AI models, Tesla CEO revealed that his AI company will also make its Grok 2 chatbot open source next week. OpenAI’s models are designed to help developers run advanced AI systems at lower costs while xAI’s move aligns with its open-source philosophy, allowing external developers to inspect, modify, and build upon Grok 2's capabilities.

“GPT-oss is out! We made an open model that performs at the level of o4-mini and runs on a high-end laptop (WTF!!) (and a smaller one that runs on a phone). Super proud of the team; big triumph of technology,” Sam Altman posted on X.

Similarly, Musk 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,” he added.

This shift towards open-sourcing like OpenAI and xAI mirrors similar initiatives from other prominent tech companies, including Meta and DeepSeek, who have already made their AI models publicly available.

What is open-sourcing

Open-sourcing technology means making the source code of a software, or the design blueprint of a product, publicly accessible. Unlike proprietary or “closed source” software, where only the developers can see and alter the code, open-source code is transparent.

Users are generally free to run the program for any purpose, whether personal, educational, or commercial. Further, anyone can inspect the code to understand how it works, learn from it and make changes or improvements.

Open-sourcing also fosters a decentralised and collaborative development model. A global community of developers, users, and enthusiasts can contribute to the project by submitting bug fixes, new features, and documentation.

Since the code is open for public scrutiny, vulnerabilities and bugs can be identified and fixed more quickly by the community. This transparency can build greater trust in the software.