AI: He calls it 'Grok'

...an apt name for Elon Musk's AI Chatbot

WSJ headline “Elon Musk unveils ‘Grok’, an AI Bot that combines Snark and Lofty Ambitions’ certainly catches one’s attention.

It got my attention with the word ‘Grok’. It’s a word that has been a part of my vocabulary since my teenage years. Particularly since the word is from the world of Sci Fi royalty Robert Heinlein.

But first some more from Elon on ‘Grok’, and his his nascent AI ambitions:

“Billionaire says first product from his artificial-intelligence startup will eventually be available to subscribers on X”,

the corporate entity formerly known as Twitter. The piece goes on with more context:

“Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup showed off its first product: a bot named Grok whose sense of humor the billionaire demonstrated with jokes about Sam Bankman-Fried and how to make cocaine.”

“Musk, in a series of social-media posts over the weekend, included those sample responses from Grok as he boasted that it has both a love of sarcasm and the advantage of access to real-time information via X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought just over a year ago.”

“An announcement Saturday night by his startup, xAI, also mixed the serious and the silly. It said Grok will be designed for tasks including information retrieval and coding assistance, part of an effort to create AI tools “that assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge.” 

“It also said that Grok “has a rebellious streak” and was modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an all-knowing guidebook in Douglas Adams’s classic science-fiction comedy novel of the same name.”

“Musk said Grok would be made available to X’s Premium+ subscribers after beta testing with a limited group of users.”

“Musk unveiled xAI in July with the mission, as stated on its website, to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

Grok thus far is an early LLM AI effort by xAI, rushed into public testing after only two months of training. Most models are trained for much longer, sometimes over a year (link below mine):

“The engine powering Grok is Grok-1, our frontier LLM, which we developed over the last four months. Grok-1 has gone through many iterations over this span of time.”

“After announcing xAI, we trained a prototype LLM (Grok-0) with 33 billion parameters. This early model approaches [Meta’s] LLaMA 2 (70B) capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources. In the last two months, we have made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities leading up to Grok-1, a state-of-the-art language model that is significantly more powerful, achieving 63.2% on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on MMLU.”

“To understand the capability improvements we made with Grok-1, we have conducted a series of evaluations using a few standard machine learning benchmarks designed to measure math and reasoning abilities.”

It does not have multimodal capabilities like OpenAI and others, and does not have capabilities equivalent to OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM AI. The latter is much larger, with over trillion parameters. Larger scale is likely planned on the xAI horizon. Grok is currently available ‘to a limited number of users in the US’, to test before a wider release. It’s as much a recruiting clarion call for AI talent, as to let the world know that Elon is on the LLM AI track as well with Google, Amazon and others.

That Elon planned xAI to be his AI gift to the world, has been highly anticipated and discussed in these pages. It goes along of course with Elon’s ambitions for an ‘Everything App’, and his unique penchant to be a true ‘wild card’ in everything he does. Even though all his ventures from Tesla to SpaceX to Twitter/X and others are relatively separate pursuits, a common thread is his ambition to tie it all together with AI. And a desire for it all to do ‘everything’. (Something also being pursued by Apple, Meta, Uber, and so many others). Not to mention leveraging technology, human, and capital resources as needed across these endeavors towards his goals.

That he’d name a ‘smart’ AI chatbot ‘Grok’ is also appropriate. A relatively recent addition to the English language, it was popularized by the venerable SciFi writer Robert Heinlein in a ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ in 1961. Although it’s generally now understood to mean ‘to understand’, the original roots are truly appropriate to where Elon comes from and is going. Especially in his ambitions to send a million people or more to Mars by 2050. He’d be 79 then. To name his first AI introduction ‘Grok’ is so appropriate, given this context from Wikipedia:

“It means 'fear', it means 'love', it means 'hate' – proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you – then you can hate it.”

As The Wrap describes the social media launch of ‘Grok’:

“Elon Musk Launches X’s AI Tool Grok, a ‘Rebellious’ Rival to ChatGPT That Answers ‘Spicy’ Questions”

Modeled after geek fiction favorite “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the bot aims to “answer questions with a bit of wit”

“Elon Musk announced his latest AI offering to the world this weekend: Grok, a ChatGPT rival that’s been “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit” and “has a rebellious streak.” The tool was modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the 1978 radio broadcast turned TV series (turned book, turned 2005 feature film).”

“The latest challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first shared by the AI team at X (formerly Twitter), xAI, who tweeted, “Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!”

“They also promised spicier takes, offering an AI engine less likely to tell you that it’s restricted from answering certain questions. “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor! A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

Grokking the heavy contextual influences from Sci Fi, from ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’, all the way back to Heinlein. They’re all back.

So perfect. So here is the broader context around ‘Grok’, worth grokking:

“Critic David E. Wright Sr. points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition of Stranger, the word grok "was used first without any explicit definition on page 22" and continued to be used without being explicitly defined until page 253 (emphasis in original).^[3] He notes that this first intensional definition is simply "to drink", but that this is only a metaphor "much as English 'I see' often means the same as 'I understand'".^[3] Critics have bridged this absence of explicit definition by citing passages from Stranger that illustrate the term. A selection of these passages follows:”

“Grok means "to understand", of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear', it means 'love', it means 'hate' – proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you – then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate – and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.^[4]”

“Grok means "identically equal". The human cliché "This hurts me worse than it does you" has a distinctly Martian flavor. The Martian seems to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer acts with observed through the process of observation. Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.^[4][5]”

“The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to praise and cherish the people they had destroyed.^[4]”

“All that groks is God.^[6]”

So appropriate. So much more interesting than the relatively prosaic celebrity ‘smart agents’ by Meta and others.

So Elon. So much to grok in all this AI stuff ahead. So Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)