On the 3rd of November 2023 Elon Musk’s “xAI Team” announced that as of this memorable day, “Grok” will be the name of “an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, a science fiction novel created during the late 1970s by English author and screenwriter Douglas Noel Adams. In this book, a certain Arthur Dent hitchhikes through the universe following the destruction of Earth by a race of nasty aliens called Vogons. Dent discovers that the Earth was actually a giant supercomputer created by Deep Thought, an even bigger computer. [i] In xAI Team’s “artifictional” wonderworld its Grok AI is “intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!” […] It was “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!” Let Grok be your guide when you hitchhike to the galaxy, have some fun and, in case you’d get bored or run out of questions, just ask xAI’s “machine-based system” what question you should ask.
Understanding the Universe
True to its word, the xAI Team doesn’t shy away from offering galactic visions on Grok’s website. After all, its mission statement is: “Understand the Universe“. And so, “AI’s knowledge should be all-encompassing and as far-reaching as possible.” In any case, I guess, as far reaching as the outer bounderies of the Universe. To assist all earthlings in understanding the universe, the Team advocates Grok as an “AI specifically to advance human comprehension and capabilities”. Under the header “Reasoning from First Principles“, the xAI Team boasts that it “challenges conventional thinking by breaking down problems to their fundamental truths, grounded in logic.” This should make Grok “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing”. Should all these sophisticated terms escape your comprehension, don’t worry, because “[a] unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform”. Let Grok seek and it will find. To the one who knocks on Grok’s door, that door will be opened.
Grokked, grokking, grocks
Without a doubt, when the xAI Team decided that “Grok” would be the name for its “machine-based system”, it was aware of the fact that “to grok” is a verb that was coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein and first used in 1961 in his science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In the book, the term “grok” is used by Martians to indicate that you cannot understand, fear, hate or appreciate something “unless you grok it”, i.e. “understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you”. “The Martian,” so Heinlein in his novel, “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. […] ‘Grok’ means ‘identically equal.’ […] 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.” Today, any dictionary will tell you that “to grok” means “to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy” and “to communicate sympathetically”. [ii]
Grokking Grok
Of course, picking Grok as the name that distinguishes your AI system from the ones designed by your competitors does have consequences. Meaning that in order to assist the users of Grok in understanding the Universe and finding truth, this “AI-companion” must above all be capable of grokking not only the Universe but truth as well. Grok must become part of ‒ “grok” ‒ what it observes, it must merge with “the observed” to the point where “the observed” merges with and becomes identically equal to Grok. The system must not only duplicate “the observed”, but understand it as well. Only then will Grok be able to deliver what it promises and share what it grokked ‒ thoroughly understood ‒ with its human “companions”. But then, the big question is: who’s to say whether Grok succeeded in grokking ‒ completely merging with ‒ and understanding ‒ knowing ‒ whatever it was asked to grok. To verify whether “truth-seeking” Grok truly grokked what it was supposed to grok, the verifier must grok it as well to determine whether Grok found and delivered what it promised to seek: truth.
Let’s ask the Martians
According to Heinlein in Stranger in a strange land, grokking is an ability that was mastered by Martians. So, I’d say that only Martians will be able to determine whether Elon Musk’s Grok will pass the grok-exam cum laude. In this regard, we seem to be in luck since Musk’s SpaceX program aims at building a City on Mars. According to the SpaceX website, Mars is “one of Earth’s closest habitable neighbors”. [iii] The red planet is located “about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is”. It “still has decent sunlight”, yet it’s “a little cold, but we can warm it up. Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.” And, allow me to suggest, once we’re hopping around in Musk’s City on Mars, let’s ask the local Martians to grok Grok and let us know if Grok is able to grok like Martians. But then, …, even if the Martians would give Grok a pass, why on earth would we place our trust in Martians or in Grok instead of letting our own human intuition, empathy and intelligence be our guide to the galaxy. After all, aren’t we the ones who were created in God’s image !
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[i] https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/summary/
