— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2023ADDED: I was going to create a new tag for Musk's new AI project, but typing in the letters, I saw that I already had a tag "grok" — lower case "g" — so I just used that, even though I knew the existing posts with that tag had to be just about the word "grok." I wasn't going to create a second "grok" tag, with an upper case "G." I don't like tag proliferation, but — more important — I wanted to publish this post with the old tag so I could click on it and see what I'd done in the past.
"Grok" is my paraphrase. The word — which I think is perfect — does not appear in the article. I've blogged "grok" before, so I won't expatiate on it this time. I'll just make a tag for it and add it retrospectively: here. This is the 6th post with that tag, which pleases me more than makes any sense.
And there's this from August 2022, after I'd read "grok" in a New York Magazine article about "crypto geniuses" who "grokked the game" (and whose "plan worked perfectly — until it didn’t").
I said:
I haven't seen "grok" in a while. That's a word coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land." It's not based on any other word, just, as the OED puts it, an "arbitrary formation."
Smith had been aware of the doctors but had grokked that their intentions were benign.... Now that he knew himself to be self he was free to grok ever closer to his brothers....
It means "To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with... To empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment."
It seems to have peaked in 1968, when Tom Wolfe wrote " Instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made..as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing" (in "The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test") and Playboy Magazine saw fit to write: "He met her at an acid-rock ball and she grokked him, this ultracool miss loaded with experience and bereft of emotion."
Back then grokking had a lot to do with LSD and the music it unleashed. These days, there's grokking about the "game" of the con of cryptocurrency. What a come down!
Don't confuse "grok" with "glom," which is an older word, slang based on the Scottish slang "glaum." The OED quotes the 1914 "Vocabulary of Criminal Slang": "Glom, to grab; to snatch; to take; implying violence. Example: 'Glom this short and drop off two blocks below.'"
There's a lot more glomming than grokking these days.
(The whole time I was writing this post, I had a sneaking feeling I'd plunged into the word "grok" before, and indeed I did, just 2 years ago, complete with OED quotes from Tom Wolfe and Playboy and much more about "Stranger in a Strange Land.")
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48 comments:
As ye grep, so shall ye grok.
A ChatBot that links me to porn bots while singing Mien Kampf.
Great
Glom--ah, yes. When better used than the Carl Barks-created rival of Scrooge McDuck, the formidable Flintheart Glomgold ("The Second Richest Duck")?
Grok became standard jargon within the 1970s-1980s computer and video game cultures. "Do you grok [understand] the new Dungeons and Dragons rules?" The early computing culture was mainly composed of over-educated mathematicians and engineers, and they were heavily into sci-fi and fantasy fiction. Computers thereby still have "daemon" software that runs in the background. And much more.
Grok is a command in the ultra-widespread Unix operating system, and there too related to improving comprehension:
https://www.unix.com/man-page/debian/1/grok/
Heh.
Prepare to hear about every big and little transgression of the boundaries of taste, the law, propriety, social etiquette, concern for the planet, and of course "wokeness" that John Daly has ever been rumored to have committed.
All of which Musk is now responsible for.
Godspeed to both of them.
The power of meme magic lives on. God bless you Elon, doing God'z work for the lulz.
"Meme them. Make them cry. And when they cry from the memes, make them cry with more memes."
- Sun Zi, The Art Of Memes
I'd forgotten about Grok's prankster origins. Like Enigma mentions above, it's huge in tech, as in "I grok this code," i.e. understand what it means
It is good to have competitors for the AI market. I suspect that the leading ones presently are being trained to give the 'correct' responses which means woke. I'm assuming grok will not. This will help prevent to some degree what I assume was and probably still is going to happen, which is people treating AI responses as some sort of message from the Oracle of Delphi. Different AIs giving different responses will knock some of the appearance of authoritativeness from them.
An AI that learns from the LLM that is twitter. Now who thinks Elon was stupid for buying the company? Do you think maybe he had seen this as a use case?
He could recoup his investment today by taking the company public.
Some good internet history in Groklaw.net and the last post alluding to Lavabit.
Stranger in a Strange Land is on the list of my favorite books by Heinlein. I did a quick google search to see when it was written (1961) and came across this article by none other than Kurt Vonnegut discussing the book.
I did not know that it was the first science fiction book on the NY Times Best seller list!
This quote from the end of the article made me think about AI:
Heinlein was bemused by those who claimed that the work provided a blueprint for a new society. The novel was not written, he explained to one fan, to promulgate any set of beliefs. "I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers . . . . It is an invitation to think -- not to believe.
Couldn't that be said about AI? People are looking to AI to provide the answers. Maybe AI should be the invitation to think, not to believe.
Brand X
This is why nobody follows white guy's advice:
One of the few black guys who did everything white guys say to do - Father in the home, etc. - just to be totally outclassed by the rule-breaking white guy who's beloved for breaking all the rules and really not giving a fuck.
Like most of the other white guys, once you scratch the surface,...
@Brian: "Now who thinks Elon was stupid for buying the company?"
Musk earned a large chunk of his fortune through government contracts and subsidies (SpaceX; Tesla). He didn't "buy" Twitter so much as shift his government-given assets to another troubled government asset (Twitter). I think there's a good chance he was forced or firmly persuaded to buy Twitter by powers in the shadows. This may have included moderate lefties and right wingers too. This may have included billionaires who avoid having a public profile.
Only federal agency and technology firm insiders knew how far off the rails the media and government agencies went from 2015 to 2022. Musk's release of the "Twitter files" revealed a widespread corruption scandal 1,000,000 times worse than Nixon's Watergate. Those in the shadows are perhaps seeing Musk as the best or only way out of a fully corrupted, dysfunctional, and reckless political system. Also see Assange and Snowden as similar gray-area efforts too.
John Daly is my absolute favorite golfer of all time. Rockstar.
When it came to chasing women, he and Tiger weren't much different.
can you grok This?
Room-Temperature Superconductor Paper Retracted by Journal Nature
A physicist whose burgeoning career has been rocked by accusations of plagiarism and professional misconduct has now had his biggest discovery invalidated by the journal that published the research.
In March, Ranga Dias and his team made the electrifying claim that they had identified a room-temperature superconductor—a discovery that, if true...
Instead, after months of public criticism from other physicists, a written request from eight of the study’s 11 authors and an internal investigation of its own, the journal Nature on Tuesday retracted the paper.
WHAT a Surprise! it turns out, that yet Another "science" report was Nothing but LIES..
Kinda like:
Covid Vaccines
Global Climate catastrophe
Global Warming
Plastic recycling
Plastic straws
Ozone depletion
Global Cooling
Global Overpopulation
Dictionary of Victorian Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words from the Underworld and Elsewhere; and, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows -- are worth owning.
@The Crack Emcee: "just to be totally outclassed by the rule-breaking white guy"
Thick and heavy pre-judging here. White guys get ripped off and cheated by other white guys every day too. So do Japanese guys by Japanese guys, Chinese guys by Chinese guys, Ecuadoran guys by Ecuadoran guys, Ethiopian guys by Ethiopian guys, etc. It's personal character that matters, not the color of the skin.
"Back then grokking had a lot to do with LSD and the music it unleashed."
Same could be said for pot, hash, opium, heroin, uppers, downers, etc.
So I believe that's backwards; users of LSD used the word grok a lot, as well as "heavy, man", which is basically a recognition form of grok.
As I was around those crowds (hippies, IT tech) back then, I recall grok being used more as slang than anything serious. I never heard it in IT at all in reference to development/coding. Maybe in passing by a few Sheldon types.
"Back then grokking had a lot to do with LSD and the music it unleashed."
Same could be said for pot, hash, opium, heroin, uppers, downers, etc.
So I believe that's backwards; users of LSD used the word grok a lot, as well as "heavy, man", which is basically a recognition form of grok.
As I was around those crowds (hippies, IT tech) back then, I recall grok being used more as slang than anything serious. I never heard it in IT at all in reference to development/coding. Maybe in passing by a few Sheldon types.
Also see: Nadsat.
Anyone who trusts the output from an AI is a fool. They've been shown to create false cites, construct outright lies, contradict within an answer, etc.
They are list processors with sophisticated delimiters under the control of humans who always have an agenda of one nature or another. Some of those delimiters are "say this in response to" and "don't ever say this about".
How in hell anyone can trust linguistic output produced under those constraints is beyond me.
The only ones I see stepping past those limits are like those that work on protein folding using a highly restricted input set focused on one area.
It’s no surprise that Elon’s grand vision for X/Twitter was to try to turn it into a financial services everything app. He’s been talking about such an app for years.
Given how well that Elon complies with consent decrees, I suspect his compliance with banking regulation will give his financial service ambition a lifetime of about 5 minutes.
“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the company sees this becoming a “full opportunity” in 2024. “It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23934216/x-twitter-bank-elon-musk-2024
Musk is a Stranger in a Strange Land.
Can someone here explain the meaning of Musk's photo? What gives with the fat old man?
LLR-democratical Rich/C****: "Given how well that Elon complies with consent decrees, I suspect his compliance with banking regulation will give his financial service ambition a lifetime of about 5 minutes."
LOL
Yeah, a co-founder of PayPal doesn't understand app-driven financial services requirements.
Rich has his "stupid gaslighting comment" spigot on Full Flow today.
Coincidentally, "grok" (as in the Heinlein meaning) was an answer on "Jeopardy" yesterday, in a category called "Odd 4-Letter Words." (It was one of the shows produced during the writer's strike, with reused questions and contestants who had been on before.) No one got it right.
jim: "Can someone here explain the meaning of Musk's photo? What gives with the fat old man?"
The "old fat man" is professional golfer John Daly whose entire career on the PGA tour has been marked by unconventional behavior, having fun, and refusal to accept the limitations or "norms" of what establishment dudes are told him he must do.
In this context, every company Musk has founded to solve existential human problems and all together will combine to make us a multi-planetary species, was laughed at and predicted to fail (see idiot LLR-democratical Rich/C**** comment above) was against the conventional thinking of the "experts".
A particularly powerful example of that is SpaceX where legions of Old Space talking heads laughed at the mere idea of reusable rockets and setting Mars colonization as an end state objective and focusing design efforts on that objective.
And Musk has a great sense of humor about it all.
Enigma said...
"Thick and heavy pre-judging here. White guys get ripped off and cheated by other white guys every day too."
You missed the point: I said nothing about anybody getting ripped off, and I don't think this picture shows anybody getting ripped off. I'm talking about the debate over how blacks should live our lives - like WEB Du Bois said, or Booker T. Washington? Like Tiger Woods or John Daly? White conservatives urge us to be like Tiger, when whites like John Daly do as they wish - and win.
Blacks chose to do as we wish as well.
I think I remember hearing it in an original episode of Star Trek.
As for the Tiger/Daly photo, it is well-known to golfers and pretty iconic as a base for memes...
Thanks Drago
The Crack Emcee: "You missed the point:..."
Regardless of topic, for Crack, the "point" of any post is: Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me........
'Given how well that Elon complies with consent decrees, I suspect his compliance with banking regulation will give his financial service ambition a lifetime of about 5 minutes.'
Have you ever heard of PayPal?
"What would later become PayPal was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Fieldlink, later renamed Confinity, a company that developed security software for hand-held devices. Having had no success with that business model, however, it switched its focus to a digital wallet. The first version of the PayPal electronic payments system was launched in 1999.
In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho. Musk was optimistic about the future success of the money transfer business Confinity was developing. Musk and Bill Harris, then-president and CEO of X.com, disagreed about the potential future success of the money transfer business and Harris left the company in May 2000. In October of that year, Musk decided that X.com would terminate its other internet banking operations and focus on payments. That same month, Elon Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of X.com, which was renamed PayPal in June 2001 and went public in 2002. PayPal's IPO listed under the ticker PYPL at $13 per share and generated over $61 million."
-- Wikipedia
You might want to read more about it some time.
Interesting that Musk was using 'X' a long time ago...
"Yeah, a co-founder of PayPal doesn't understand app-driven financial services requirements."
I'm sure Rich is a multibillionaire too. I mean, look how smart he is.
@OG Mike: My background is M&A. I do not trust any app, bank, or computer with all of my financial information. My finances are scattered, ie: I have no banking app on any phone or portable device, it is only on my home computer behind a firewall and password protected. I have 3 banks, all isolated from each other. This in case the bank fails or is hacked. Almost all purchases are done by credit card, not a debit card as there is a federal law that says the credit card company must reimburse fraud transactions. An ATM debit, even if fraud, gets an “oh well” from the deposit bank. Musk will guarantee nothing and any loss you take will be your loss without any support from X/Twitter.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land when I was in college, and like many other sci-fi loving STEM majors “grok” became part of my everyday vocabulary. This lasted until a girlfriend stopped me, looked me squarely in the eyes, and told me that a person as intelligent and as articulate as I did not need to use made-up words. I don’t think I’ve used the word more than three or four times in the intervening 55 years.
"This lasted until a girlfriend stopped me, looked me squarely in the eyes, and told me that a person as intelligent and as articulate as I did not need to use made-up words."
Grok is a perfectly cromulent word.
It turns out that "FinTech" has finally figured out how to make money.
They are now the top providers of payday loans, AND they have no need to follow state usery laws like the poor downtrodden payday loan stores (because your Arkansas minimum wager is now borrowing from out of state.)
The newest trend (to my knowledge) is loans based on accrued wages, so gig workers can get paid in close to real time for whatever they just did.
I try not to be judgemental about business matters, and I realize they are providing a service to people. But, most people are just slightly evolved chimps and you can see where this is going. A brave new road to serfdom.
Does Musk figure he'll have idiotic influencers paying him to hawk crap on X, and then loan the rubes $s to buy it?
Will there be a market in which "users" are bought and sold?
'I'm talking about the debate over how blacks should live our lives - like WEB Du Bois said, or Booker T. Washington?'
Newsflash: white people don't give a fuck how black people live their lives as long as they aren't committing crimes.
I hold white people to the same standard.
@Rich - I manage my money same as you, almost to the letter. The difference between us is, apparently, I am a bit more reticent criticizing the business plans of a man who has made billions of dollars.
LLR-democratical Rich/C****: Musk will guarantee nothing and any loss you take will be your loss without any support from X/Twitter."
Musk will follow all statutory/legal requirements (by country) as well as deliver on any and all market demand requirements necessary to achieve the appropriate market competitive position in terms of risk mitigation for customers. As he has always done for all his businesses.
Your continued mind reading - gaslighting BS vomited up for political purposes in order to advance the democratical narratives as pre-cursors to the inevitable lawfare attacks against Musk are actually quite pathetic and embarrassing...for you.
Its clearly becoming ever more difficult for you fulfilling your Althouse blog LLR-democratical role and I suspect we have more than enough data points to establish that long term trend line....
And you arent the only bloke around here heavily involved in M&A, though some of us specialize in the actual execution of the merger/integration and have to make the BS accountant spreadsheet-based value/synergy proposition become the operational reality.
I was a Heinlein fan from my teens (late "50's, early '60's). He was not an easy writer (particularly a SciFi writer) to pigeon-hole. I could call him a libertarian-militarist, but that would be incomplete.
When I was in law school in NYC, several of my left-wing hippy-dippy friends (not LS), had read Stranger in a Strange Land -- and you knew they had because they said "grok" -- so I told them that Heinlein had written a lot of other really cool books, and they should read them, too: Starship Troopers, Glory Road, Farnham's Freehold. I don't recall that any of them ever asked me for a book recommendation again. But we remained friends.
What I respect the most about Musk (over the objections of the democratical Little Brains) is that Musk is the one of the best organizational visionary/strategists...along with being one of the best portfolio of businesses visionary/strategists...along with being one of the best ever "operationalizer"/strategy execution leader...for some of the largest and most complex businesses on earth.
And every business matters in terms of addressing critical all-humanity needs now and in the future.
Not too shabby.
@Mason G., anyone who uses the word “cromulent” probably sleeps alone. Something that I, back then, did not wish to do.
The Godfather:
Yep. ST and FF are particularly different from the spacey SSL. His later books grew ever more weird.
Everything on one app sounds great and efficient, until it gets hacked.
LLR-democratical Rich/C****: "Everything on one app sounds great and efficient, until it gets hacked."
LOL
Thats likely not your real concern at all.
Your real concern is much more likely that you, as a hack partisan democratical, fear Musk will be successful in providing financial services to people who would then not be at the mercy of your beloved leftist govt/woke bank alliance who will cut off political opponents ftom their financial resources as well as target lawful businesses that run counter to democratical political desires.
Transparent.
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