[conservatism_IS_compassion]

So in a couple of months xAI has gone from “zero to sixty.” From announcement of the organization to announcement of a (beta) product of AI which uses humor.

According to a review by a Tesla enthusiast ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9oM0ManQyg ) the thing has a vulgar mode. And (he quotes from Twitter X) writes text which which, to my eye, looks like it must have been human-written. I.e., it’s hard to see how it doesn’t pass the Touring Test. And xAI expects to improve it rapidly over the next six months! Grok even will try to suggest questions to ask it.

The plan is to make it available to premium X subscribers, and people are reportedly lining up to try it so fast that it looked like a denial-of-service attack. At the price of a premium X subscription, if this thing takes off anything like ChatGPT did at first, it will make X profitable.

[COBOL2Java]

The term "grok" was invented by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, in his 1961 novel "Stranger In A Strange Land"

[GOPJ]

Grok
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Grok
Grok /ˈɡrɒk/ is a neologism coined by American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

[BushCountry]

Elon just posted Stranger in a strange land. I guess to let us know where he stole the name of his AI.

[bert]

[eeriegeno]

It seems to me that the AI crowd is trying to tell us that they can make a computer think without human intervention? It isn’t possible. AI needs to be relabeled HR (Human Repetition). There is absolutely nothing intelligent about AI except that an intelligent human wrote the algorithm!

[OldCountryBoy]

ai is just a “key word” search tool on one of the most corrupted and incorrect reference data bases in existence.

[Bernard]

Using the work grok without properly providing credit for the word's origin is only important to people who read and remember things. Having an understanding of how history works can also irritate the process.

I would expect that most people will either not care where the term grok came from, or they will have to look it up.

[Red Badger]

[freedomjusticeruleoflaw]

Heinlein.

[PGalt]

Intersting

[moovova]

Oh...you said "Grok"...never mind.

[Nifster]

Why would I want a machine try and write my thoughts?

[Bon of Babble]

As a huge fan of classic sci-fi, I too caught this immediately, as anyone familiar with the genre would.

That said, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is one of my very favorite books. I used to read aloud from that book to my kids when they were young.

Opening lines:

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

Also this from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”