Grok (not Groot, which would be paradoxical but fun) is a term that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be interpreted as “understand intuitively or out of empathy, relate to” and “to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); in addition to experience pleasure«. There is quite a bit of literature on the original meaning of the term, coined by Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 novel A Stranger in a Strange Land, although We can summarize it in a kind of absolute and intuitive understanding of something.

Until now it was a very little used term, but that has since changed Grok was the name Elon Musk chose for the first model and an artificial intelligence service from xAI, a company he founded a few months ago, with which he intends to take on the giants of the sector and offer an alternative to Bard, Bing, ChatGPT and others. We live in the age of the LLM (Large Language Model), so this was the first logical step to be expected.

The use of the term Stranger in a Strange Land is not the only reference to science fiction, tweet released xAI in which Grok announces that for its preparation They were based on a guide named The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxyone of the best novels of this genre, which Musk has already alluded to on previous occasions, for example with the towel stored in the Tesla Roadster launched into orbit in 2018 or with the Easter egg of Tesla vehicles when trying to change the name to 42.

Announcing Grok!

Grok is an AI modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so he’s tasked with answering almost anything, and even more difficult, even suggesting what questions to ask!

Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use…

– xAI (@xai) November 5, 2023

Created by xAI, Grok is the first AI from Elon Musk’s company and will debut on Twitter, as an exclusive service for subscribers and, according to some media, only for subscribers of Premium+, the recently announced new level of subscription of the social network. And what is Grok’s differentiating factor with respect to other services like the ones above? Well, here the curves begin, which the model was accurately trained with Twitter content.

Many of us still remember the traumatic learning that Microsoft experienced with Tay, a bot created by those from Redmond that was launched on Twitter on March 23, 2016, and within hours and “thanks” to its interactions with users of the social network, it was already providing racist, sexist, false information. .. in short, she soaked up the spirit of the social network very well and very quickly. 16 hours after its launch, Microsoft decided to “shut down” forever.

CI’m sure xAI will use other resources in Grok’s training, not just Twitter posts, but even in such a case, and unless the process of selecting data for processing was exceptionally extensive, we can expect an AI loaded with biases, memes and false information. And I don’t know, but if there’s a chatbot question about a matter I’m concerned about, I’d rather not get a “why do you want to know that haha ​​​​​​​​​​​salu2?” But hey, we live in the age of memes, so as I stated at the beginning of this news, what could be wrong with salt?