Elon Musk testifies that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models
Key takeaways
- Open AI and Anthropic have been on the warpath lately against third-party efforts to train new AI models by prompting their publicly-accessible chatbots and APIs, a process known as distillation.
- That conversation has focused on Chinese firms using distillation to create open-weight models that are nearly as capable as U.S. offerings, but available at a much lower cost.
- Musk is in the process of suing OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman, alleging they breached the original nonprofit mission for OpenAI by shifting the entity to a for-profit structure.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Open AI and Anthropic have been on the warpath lately against third-party efforts to train new AI models by prompting their publicly-accessible chatbots and APIs, a process known as distillation.
That conversation has focused on Chinese firms using distillation to create open-weight models that are nearly as capable as U.S. offerings, but available at a much lower cost. However, tech workers have widely assumed that American labs use these techniques on each other to avoid falling behind competitors.
Now, we know it s true in at least one case: on the stand in a California federal court on Thursday, Elon Musk was asked if xAI has used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he asserted it was a general practice among AI companies. Asked if that meant yes, he said, Partly.