Word of the week: Grok

Content warning: E**n M**k

First-edition copy of “Stranger in a Strange Land” (1961), the source of “grok”

Grok is one of the most successful coined words in 20th-century literature, and possibly the only one, as Merriam-Webster tells us, that derives from Martian:

Yes, we do mean the language of the planet Mars. … Grok was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The book’s main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a Martian-raised human who comes to Earth as an adult, bringing with him words from his native tongue and a unique perspective on the strange ways of earthlings. Grok was quickly adopted by the youth culture of America and has since peppered the vernacular of those who grok it.

In the novel, grok is undefined “in Earthling terms,” a Wikipedia entry notes, “but can be associated with various literal meanings such as ‘water’, ‘to drink’, ‘to relate’, ‘life’, or ‘to live’, and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality.” The OED makes a terrestrial effort, defining grok as “to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment.”

(The full Wikipedia article is full of fascinating grok-talk, including a possible etymology.)

So why bring up grok today? Because of this Wall Street Journal article (gift link), published at 1:44 p.m. ET on November 4. The headline reads: “Elon Musk Says His New AI Bot ‘Grok’ Will Have Sarcasm and Access to X Information.” (That’s “X” as in “formerly known as Twitter,” not “X” as in “some unknown number,” although the latter may be relevant as well.)

Yes, I’m sorry to say I’m going to be talking about Elon Musk again.¹ As little as possible, but enough to allow you to, well, grok what’s going on.

Here’s the lede of the WSJ story:

Elon Musk gave a glimpse of his artificial-intelligence startup’s first product: a bot named Grok whose sense of humor he demonstrated with jokes about Sam Bankman-Fried and how to make cocaine.

As if AI weren’t worrisome enough, now it’ll come with added sarcasm? Peachy.

(Coincidentally—I think—Ben Zimmer’s “Word on the Street” column in Friday’s WSJ was about, yes, sarcasm. Ben’s hook was the recent death of Matthew Perry, the “Friends” co-star with the sardonic delivery.)

I can see why Musk would want to name his chatbot GROK. After all, it’s a bot that groks your intention, although maybe with more snark than Heinlein-esque empathy. And a made-up Martian word makes sense as well. Musk is famously obsessed with Mars: He’s been talking about “colonizing” the Red Planet since at least 2001, and last month he announced that one of his SpaceX rockets might land on Mars in three or four years.

What I personally do not grok is how Musk expects to get trademark protection for GROK. (His artificial-intelligence company, X.AI, filed for registration on October 23, 2023; approval from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office could take a while if it happens at all.) Why am I skeptical? Because another American artificial-intelligence company, Texas-based Grok Stream, already has registered a handful of trademarks for GROK, in the same international trademark class as Musk’s GROK. In fact, Grok Stream’s logo makes it look as though the company intends to drop the Stream:

Grok Stream calls itself “the industry’s most comprehensive AIOps solution,” which may be just distinctive enough from “the industry’s most sarcastic chatbot” to pass muster with the USPTO, whose lawyers are charged with protecting the public from “likelihood of confusion.” But I can only speculate: I am not a trademark lawyer (although as a name developer I have prepared many brand names for trademark vetting and eventual filing). We’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, if you want to get smarter about AI, here’s a list of books, articles, and podcasts on the subject shared last week by former President Obama.

1. My previous stories: “Going to Blazes,” about X/Twitter’s bad new tagline; and “What I’ll Miss About Twitter.”