Dolly vs. Grok

Overview

Dolly is an LLM trained using the Databricks machine learning platform. Originally released without instruct-finetuning, Dolly v2 included tuning on the Stanford Alpaca dataset.

Initial release: 2023-03-24

Reference

https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/04/12/dolly-first-open-commercially-viable-instruction-tuned-llm

Further Reading

Overview

Grok is the proprietary model family available through xAI's products and API. Grok 4.5 is the current generation, focused on coding, agentic tasks, reasoning, and knowledge work.

xAI introduced Grok in November 2023 and released the weights for Grok-1 under Apache 2.0 in March 2024. Later generations are proprietary and available through Grok, X, and the xAI API. Grok 4.5, released in July 2026, is xAI's current flagship model for software engineering, tool-driven agents, complex reasoning, and professional knowledge work.

Initial release: 2023-11-05

Current generation: Grok 4.5

Reference

https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5

Further Reading

• https://github.com/xai-org/grok-1/tree/main
• https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5