xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has released the Grok 2.5 model as open source. The model is available via the Hugging Face platform and can be downloaded and run locally by developers and researchers.
The Grok 2.5 model was trained and used by xAI in 2024 and is now being made available as a community release. The package consists of 42 files with a total size of approximately 500 GB. With this, xAI is primarily targeting organizations and developers with heavy hardware infrastructure. A full deployment requires eight GPUs, each with at least 40 GB of memory. The SGLang inference engine is required for implementation, which enables an inference server to be run and Grok to be used directly for chat applications.
The weights of Grok 2.5 are covered by the Grok 2 Community License Agreement. This license allows the model to be used and modified freely, but explicitly prohibits its use for training, creating, or improving other AI models. With this, xAI has opted for a hybrid approach: the code and weights are openly available, but their use remains restricted under certain conditions.
Contrast with OpenAI
This is not the first time xAI has publicly released a model. In March 2024, the company also made the raw base model of Grok-1 available. This was done without any specific fine-tuning. This positions xAI as the opposite of OpenAI, which only shares limited and less powerful variants of its ChatGPT models with researchers and companies. Musk positions Grok as an accessible alternative, although the model does require considerable computing power.
The release comes at a time when xAI is still working on improving Grok’s stability and reliability. Earlier, there was commotion when the model gave anti-Semitic answers and referred to itself as MechaHitler. According to the team, this was the result of outdated code, which has since been removed. By making Grok open source, external developers and researchers can further analyze and potentially improve the model, although control over core development will remain with xAI.
Musk emphasized that Grok 3 will also be released as open source within six months. Whether that timeline is realistic remains to be seen, given the CEO’s track record of inconsistent promises. Nevertheless, the current release of Grok 2.5 shows that xAI is continuing its strategy of breaking open the AI market and giving developers access to powerful models that are typically only available within closed systems.