Elon Musk Says His AI Startup xAI Will Open-source its Grok Chatbot

 Elon Musk (Reuters)
Elon Musk (Reuters)
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Elon Musk Says His AI Startup xAI Will Open-source its Grok Chatbot

 Elon Musk (Reuters)
Elon Musk (Reuters)

Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence firm xAI will open-source "Grok", a chatbot rivaling OpenAI's ChatGPT, this week.
The development comes about two months after the Tesla CEO said he felt uncomfortable growing the carmaker into a leader in AI and robotics unless he had at least 25% voting control of the company, Reuters said.
Earlier this month, Musk sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, saying they had abandoned the startup's original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit.
In a podcast episode with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Musk suggested in November that he liked the concept of open-source AI. The billionaire's startup launched the AI model to a small group of users that month.
In December, xAI rolled out its ChatGPT competitor Grok for Premium+ subscribers of social media platform X, aiming to create what Musk has said would be a "maximum truth-seeking AI".



Microsoft Looks to Boost AI Performance in European Languages

FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo
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Microsoft Looks to Boost AI Performance in European Languages

FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo

US tech behemoth Microsoft is investing millions of dollars to funnel more European-language data into AI development, company president Brad Smith told AFP Monday.

With today's leading AI models mostly trained on material in English, "the survival of these languages and the health of these cultures is quite literally at stake" without a course correction, Smith said in an interview.

AI models are "less capable when it is in a language that has insufficient data," he added -- which could push more users to switch to English even when it is not their native language.

Microsoft will from September set up research units in the eastern French city Strasbourg to "help expand the availability of multilingual data for AI development" in at least 10 of the European Union's 24 languages, including Estonian and Greek.

The work will include digitizing books and recording hundreds of hours of audio.

"This isn't about creating data for Microsoft to own. It is about creating data for the public to be able to use," Smith said, adding that the information would be shared on an open-source basis.

The US-based company has in recent months striven to position itself as especially compatible with a gathering political push for European technological sovereignty.

Leaders in the bloc have grown increasingly nervous at their dependency on US tech firms and infrastructure since Donald Trump's reelection to the White House.

In June, Microsoft said it was stepping up cooperation with European governments on cybersecurity and announced new "data sovereignty" measures for its data centers on the continent.

Smith said that Monday's announcement was just the latest evidence of the company's commitment to Europe.

Most leading AI firms are American or Chinese, although Europe has some standouts like France's Mistral or Franco-American platform Hugging Face.

Away from Microsoft, some European initiatives such as TildeLM are pushing to develop local-language AI models.

The Windows and Office developer also said Monday that it was working on a digital recreation of Paris' Notre-Dame cathedral that it plans to gift to the French state, as well as digitizing items from the country's BNF national library and Decorative Arts Museum.