xAI releases the Grok-1 model weights
The company published the base model under an open license, a move Musk had promised for weeks.
Archive entry. This article looks back at an event from March 17, 2024. It was drafted with AI assistance from public records and is being fact-checked. See our About page.
On March 17, 2024, xAI published the weights and architecture of its Grok-1 model under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. Elon Musk had said days earlier that xAI would do so.
The release covered the base model, not a version fine-tuned for chat, and the model was very large, so running it required substantial hardware.
The move fit with Musk's criticism of OpenAI for becoming less open. Later Grok versions were not released in the same way at launch.