Elon Musk’s xAI firm has finally open-sourced the weights of the Grok 2.5 AI model, which was released last year. It’s essentially an open-weight AI model, meaning only the weights have been released. It’s a Mixture-of-Expert AI Model with a total of 268B parameters, and features eight experts.
Musk on X wrote, “The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source.” Along with that, Musk has confirmed that Grok 3, which was released in February 2025, will be open-sourced in about six months from now.
So basically, we might have access to Grok 3’s weights by February of 2026, after one year of its release. Note that while Grok 2/2.5 was not a very powerful AI model, starting with the Grok 3 AI model, xAI significantly improved the performance.
So when xAI releases the Grok 3 model next year, it may make some buzz in the open-source arena. Currently, Chinese AI models are dominating in the open-source space, leaving behind Western contenders like Meta’s Llama and Mistral’s AI models.
Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen 3, DeepSeek V3.1, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2, Z.ai’s GLM-4.5 are leading the charge with a much better license. The Grok 2.5 AI model comes with a custom “Community License” and permitted only for “non-commercial and research purposes.”
