US tech billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI has open-sourced Grok 2.5, an earlier version of its model series, intensifying the global race to challenge China’s lead in making AI products freely available for anyone to use, modify and share.
Musk said on social media platform X.com over the weekend that Grok 2.5, touted as the company’s “best model last year”, was uploaded to Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI platform. He added that Grok 3 would become open source within the next six months.
The decision comes on the heels of OpenAI’s recent release of two open-source models – GPT-OSS-120b and GPT-OSS-20b – highlighting efforts by US companies to challenge Chinese competitors like Alibaba Group Holding and DeepSeek, which currently lead the global open-source AI race. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Zhou Hongyi, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, which develops its own AI products, said on Sunday that China’s open-source AI movement put pressure on US companies to follow suit.
[LIVE] China Future Tech webinar | A deep dive into China’s open-source AI revolution
[LIVE] China Future Tech webinar | A deep dive into China’s open-source AI revolution
The open and free AI ecosystem built by firms like DeepSeek had been attracting US enterprises and educational institutions, prompting American AI labs to rethink their strategies and consider offering some of their products for free, he said.
