Grok 3 - The Name Says It All
- prateetisengupta
- Mar 24
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 25
Computer scientists and engineers have never had to work too hard, or search too far to find catchy names for technologies, architectures and products, hardware or software. All they ever had to do was rummage through some time-honoured classics, and out popped gems like “Big-Endian”, “Little-Endian”, “Oracle”, “Delphi”, “Yahoo”, “Kafka”, “Cassandra”. The list is long enough but the latest one that seems to have taken the Internet by storm is “Grok 3”, the AI tool from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI. If you did not know already, the word “grok” is taken from Robert A. Heinlein’s novel ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ and happens to be extraordinarily appropriate in a whole lot of unexpected ways. More on that later.
The hype surrounding the technological prowess of Grok 3 is enormous, powered as it is by the "Colossus" supercluster, a massive computing infrastructure with over 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, enabling its rapid development and complex computations. Grok 3 is being touted as the most powerful LLM on earth right now, surpassing ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek to name a few. No wonder the Internet is going wild with glee at its fearless responses and devil-may-care attitude.
It all stems, perhaps, from the need for free speech, a topic on which Mr. Musk has been extremely vocal for quite some time. One may also wonder if in some oblique manner Grok 3 reflects his views concerning laws and regulations, which he considers to be hindrances to progress. Although there’s proof enough that Mr. Musk is by no means a “free speech absolutist”, there seems to be a tremendous drive to equip the tool with the maximum amount of content from all possible sources.
Grok3 is reportedly trained by 12.8 trillion tokens using a massive dataset of text and code, including legal texts and court documents, and utilizes a sophisticated multi-modal training process, including real-time data up to February 2025 from public internet sources and X (formerly Twitter) platform data, along with advanced reinforcement learning methods.
A Business Standard article mentions that when it was introduced in November 2023, xAI stated that it was modelled after Douglas Adams' fascinating and beloved creation 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.'
“Grok is an AI modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest 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 it if you hate humor,” xAI said in a blog post announcing Grok.
A very noble sentiment indeed.
But the question is, which version of the “Guide”? Adams talks about two editions of the "book" (if it can be called that). The first is a device that looks rather like a “largish electronic calculator”. It has about a hundred tiny, flat press buttons, and a screen about four inches square. Any one of a million “pages” can be summoned on this screen at a moment's notice. It looks “insanely complicated”, and the snug plastic cover into which it fits has the words “DON’T PANIC” printed on it in "large, friendly" letters.
The next, more advanced version of the Guide, as the author solemnly informs us with his customary deadpan humour, is named “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mk II” and it is the “single most astounding thing of any kind ever”; it is a small, black, circular object about the size of a side plate. Its top and bottom are smoothly convex, and it resembles a lightweight throwing discus. Most importantly, there is a single word written on it, in "small, alarming" letters - “Panic”.
Now which one of these two versions Grok 3 will turn out to be is something only time (the only other dimension we think we understand apart from the three familiar ones), can tell. Unless, of course, Grok 3, like the Guide Mk II, is smart enough to operate on infinite dimensions.
While on the subject of dimensions, we may as well say a few words about the other literary source that focuses on the very etymology of the name “Grok”. For the uninitiated, as mentioned above, “grok” is a word created by the well-known science fiction writer Robert Anson Heinlein. First published in June 1961, brilliant, mind-bending, yet wonderfully humanizing, ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ generated a lot of controversy due to its deliberately provocative subject matter.
The free love and commune living aspects of the Church of All Worlds that Heinlein describes in the book, and the rumours of its association with Charles Manson led to its removal from school reading lists and libraries. Despite a string of negative reviews, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. In 2012, it was included in a Library of Congress exhibition of "Books That Shaped America".
The coining of the word “grok” is one of the long-term legacies of the novel. The protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human child, born on Mars, raised by Martians, and brought back to Earth where he encounters wildly alien dimensions of space, time, atmosphere, and culture. “Grok” is a Martian word that he subsequently introduces to the other characters.
Given the completely non-earthly nature of the language, it goes without saying that “grok” has no exact synonym in any language familiar to humans. At its simplest, “grok” means “to drink” in English. But it also means a hundred other English words representing quite different or even antithetical concepts. It means “fear”, it means “love”, it also means “hate”.
"Why hate?", you may ask. Well, for the Martians, in order to truly hate someone or something, you have to know that person or object, completely, to become one with them. Only then can you really hate them, by hating yourself. It means to understand and observe something so thoroughly that the observer merges with the observed simply through the process of observation. It means to blend, to intermarry, to lose individual identity in group experience. It means ‘identically equal’ in the mathematical sense. It means everything that humans do by religion, philosophy, and science. It even means to consume and be consumed, both literally and figuratively. Heinlein’s unique yet bizarre sense of humour does not rule out cannibalism, as readers discover in a chilling twist near the end of the novel (spoiler alert!), where Mike’s body is actually ingested by his “water brothers” in a Dionysian ritual performed in an incredibly Apollonian manner.
So, when an AI chat bot named “Grok” is unleashed into cyberspace, and when it is trained in the manner that Grok 3 is, the results are bound to be hilarious, intriguing, infuriating, somewhat unhinged and scary, all rolled into one.
As Elon Musk has reportedly stated, Grok 3’s mission is truly ambitious: “to understand the universe. We want to answer the biggest questions: Where are the aliens? What’s the meaning of life? How does the universe end? To do that, we must rigorously pursue truth.” In the process, the responses that Grok 3 is returning are a rather flamboyant and unfiltered mix of facts and figures, sometimes laced with profanities and verbal violence. Bearing in mind Heinlein’s own uninhibited style, and his interest in sentient computers, I think he would have enjoyed playing with Grok 3 immensely.
But the fact remains that a distinctive feature of Grok is its real-time access to X (formerly Twitter) posts, providing it with up-to-date knowledge. This means it consumes and learns from user-generated content, which varies in tone and appropriateness.
Notably, X users are automatically opted in to have their posts used for training Grok unless they manually opt out, raising privacy concerns. This default setting has drawn a lot of scrutiny, as it potentially exposes the AI to offensive language and abusive content. And if Grok 3 lives up to its name it may even pose a very palpable threat to Internet security.
The final question, I believe, is: where do we go from here?
[Sources:
‘Stranger In A Strange Land’, The Original Uncut Version, Copyright © 2003 by the Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust.
Image courtesy:
Cover design for the ©2003 edition by James Warhola and Candle Communications Corporation]
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