You’ve likely heard Elon Musk discuss Grok, the witty open-source AI chatbot created by his company xAI. Have you ever pondered the reason behind his decision to rebrand his AI system from TruthGPT to Grok?

Interestingly, xAI is not the only Silicon Valley company that is fascinated by the name Grok. There is a California-based AI chip company also named Groq (but with a ‘q’), which introduced a language processing unit (LPU), a new end-to-end processing unit system, earlier this year.

That’s not all. Last year, New Relic, the company behind the leading observability platform, also named its AI-powered observability assistant New Relic Grok.

In a recent interaction with AIM, New Relic CEO Ashan Willy joked that Musk stole the name from New Relic. “We did not copyright it,” he remarked.

And that’s not all either. Canadian musician Claire Elise Boucher, popularly known as Grimes released an AI-powered range of toys, one of which is named Grok.

Grimes, who shares three children with Musk, collaborated with Silicon Valley startup Curio to introduce these products. Intriguingly, there’s no connection between Curio’s offerings and Musk’s Grok; in fact, Curio’s AI toys came onto the scene even before Musk’s AI chatbot.

Why is Grok so popular?

So the question does arise, why are so many Silicon Valley products named Grok? The answer could be linked to Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Heinlein coined the term ‘grok’. In his novel, Valentine Michael Smith, a Martian, employs the word ‘grok’, which denotes empathising to such a deep extent with others that you merge or blend with them, conveying a profound understanding of someone or something.

In short, Grok means to understand things intuitively and empathetically, and hence, it makes sense to name an AI system Grok in an era when we are chasing superintelligence. 

While it’s not certain, Heinlein’s novel is definitely the source of inspiration for Silicon Valley’s fascination with the word grok.

In an interview, Musk mentioned Heinlein’s novel as one of his favourites, along with Isaac Asimov’s works. Musk also tweeted the name of the book last year, but without providing any context.

Musk’s keen interest in colonising Mars might also stem from his deep admiration for Heinlein’s and Asimov’s works, both of which prominently feature Mars in their narratives.

Grokking the code 

Even before Musk made the name Grok popular, it was a widely used term, both as a verb and noun, in the programming space.  

In 1995, Ric Holt designed a database query engine for manipulating collections of binary relations and named it Grok (now defunct). Jingwei Wu at the University of Waterloo wrote a Java re-implementation of Grok, called JGrok. 

In 2006, a number of  Zope developers created an open-source web framework based on Zope Toolkit (ZTK) technology called Grok.

Then there is Grok AIOps, which was developed by Grokstream. Over the years, the word grok has been adopted to convey a deep, intuitive understanding of a concept, particularly when working with complex systems or technologies. 

In the context of programming, “grokking” refers to not just comprehending code or algorithms superficially but rather internalising them to the point of truly understanding their intricacies and implications. 

Silicon Valley’s fascination with science fiction

Interestingly, this is not the first time Silicon Valley got influenced by popular science fiction. Over the years, we have seen many founders being heavily influenced by it. 

When OpenAI announced that its professional plan for ChatGPT was priced at $42, many linked it to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, another popular science fiction.

In Chapter 27 of the novel, two programmers, Lunkwill and Fook, are chosen to ask the Ultimate Question to Deep Thought, a supernatural computer programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The supercomputer pauses for a moment and reveals the answer—42.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself has made references to the number. Last year, when asked about the release date of the upcoming multimodal successor to GPT-3, in a nod to the book, Altman joked, saying that the model will take “a while” to finish and that it kept responding ‘42’ to every prompt. 

Moreover, Grok is modelled after Adams’ popular novel, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask, xAI notes.

Similarly, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has revealed his enduring love for Star Trek, a passion that dates back to his childhood. He attributes the inspiration for Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, to the omniscient computer featured on the Starship Enterprise in the series.