Grok 2, built on Musk’s proprietary Grok-1 language model, has been marketed as a less filtered and more “truth-seeking” alternative to tools like ChatGPT or Claude. 

Unlike many rivals, it draws directly from live data on X (formerly Twitter), enabling it to react to breaking news and trending conversations in real time. It also offers multimodal features, producing text, images, and video, and is currently available to X Premium+ subscribers.

By open sourcing the system, developers and researchers will gain direct access to Grok 2’s underlying code and architecture. This would allow them to audit, modify, and build upon the technology. 

Musk framed the decision as part of a consistent release pattern, stating it was “high time” to share the new model with the public. This aligns with a growing industry shift toward open-weight AI models, with Meta’s LLaMA, Mistral, and the GPT-oss series from OpenAI following similar paths.

However, Grok’s looser content restrictions have attracted complaints, with past instances of misleading or offensive responses bringing concern. Opening up its code could amplify risks, including the spread of misinformation or the misuse of the technology in sensitive fields such as medical diagnostics or autonomous systems. 

Grok Imagine—its image and video generator—has already been caught in controversy over its potential to produce explicit content, prompting further debate on the balance between openness and safety.

xAI continues to present Grok as a counterweight to larger AI players like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, putting transparency and developer freedom at the forefront. 

Analysts also note that this strategy may strengthen Musk’s business network, opening possibilities for integration across Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X.

The announcement came directly from Omar Sanseviero, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind, who confirmed the figures on X over the weekend. 

In addition to the downloads, more than 70,000 custom variations of Gemma have already been built on Hugging Face, a widely used platform among developers.

Gemma, which launched in February 2024, is part of Google’s initiative to compete with other open model providers, especially Meta’s Llama series. 

The latest versions of Gemma can work with both images and text, a capability known as being “multimodal.” They also support more than 100 languages and include versions optimised for tasks like drug research.

However, when placed side-by-side with Meta’s Llama, Gemma’s traction seems to be on a moderate level. Llama passed 1.2 billion downloads in April 2025, nearly ten times what Gemma has achieved. In a space where momentum matters, such a gap is hard to ignore.

But volume alone doesn’t determine usefulness. What’s more important is what developers can actually do with these models. And that’s where the trouble starts. 

Both Gemma and Llama have been flagged by developers for having restrictive and unclear licensing. These are not the standard open licenses many in the community are used to. Some have argued that the vague terms make it risky to deploy the models in commercial settings.

That has led to hesitation, particularly among startups and businesses that can’t afford legal ambiguity. I’ve spoken with teams who say they’ve skipped over both Gemma and Llama entirely for this reason. The concern isn’t about capability, but clarity.

So while Google celebrates 150 million downloads, there are issues about what those downloads actually represent. Are developers using the models in real products? Or are they just experimenting, unsure whether they can actually go to market with them?