Elon Musk's xAI Corp. has released its large language model, Grok, as open source, directly competing with models like Meta's Llama 2 and Mistral 8x7B.

The Grok-1 model can be accessed via GitHub at 'xai-org/grok-1' with example code provided for using the model with JAX.

Grok-1 is under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, but requires substantial GPU memory for efficient operation.

The model includes an inefficient MoE layer implemented for the purpose of validating the model's correctness.

Musk's decision to open-source Grok-1 is seen as a strategic move amidst his lawsuit and criticisms against OpenAI, and it raises the stakes for other language model providers to prove their value.