Elon Musk calls OpenAI 'a lie' after announcing plans to make his 'spicy' ChatGPT rival open-source this week

Elon Musk has a chatbot. An edgy chatbot, no less. It's called Grok and it's set to go open-source sometime this week. Which bits of the bot will be open to the scrutiny of others isn't entirely clear yet, as Musk has only published his plans in a seven-word post on X. However, the move does appear to have been spurred by Musk's tumultuous relationship with the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but his role has diminished over time. Last week, Musk filed a lawsuit against the company and its CEO, Sam Altman. In it, he claimed that OpenAI breached its original charter when it signed up to a multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft and that the company, famed for ChatGPT, is no longer open—a claim Musk is seemingly referencing in a recent reply to a user on X that reads «OpenAI is a lie».

The lawsuit claims that Musk, Altman, and now president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, had agreed that the founding agreement of OpenAI would be to offer a counterweight to commercial artificial general intelligence (AGI), which allegedly both Musk and Altman shared similar views on being a serious threat to humanity. The lawsuit states the three went as far as to memorialise their aims in the company's Certificate of Incorporation, noting «resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person.»

Musk claims the company has departed from that founding agreement in seeking profit and its ties with Microsoft.

«To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI 'benefits all of humanity.' In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,» the lawsuit alleges.

This week, @xAI will open source GrokMarch 11, 2024

Meanwhile, OpenAI has rebuffed these claims in a blog post,