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What's with his obession with the name "grok" though? Sounds like the sound frog made
It's from a book I love, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. The word is the Martian term for fully understanding something.
That's really funny. He steals the name Tesla and Grok and when he tries to come up with his own names, we get "X" and "X Æ A-Xii"
All the tech fascists steal words. Palantir is from Lord of the Rings.
Which infuriates me as a LotR fan.
and also makes me side eye Chris Tolkien hard, cause he is normally very aggressive in protecting the intellectual property..
And Apple is a fruit smh
I do not sense a wrongness in your post so I will not disappear you. :)
What an obscure reach to make.
It's been part of deep nerd culture for decades, but not really pop culture.
I believe it is from the book stranger in a strange land. Its meaning is like to deeeeply understand, I think.
You got the original explanation, but grok was taken up by computer nerds way back in the day. It's not merely understanding a thing, in the book or the slang. To grok means to completely wrap your head around the subject, not merely surface level understanding, really feel it down deep.
As to Musk's obsession? He wants to be seen as the cool kid, the smart hacker, the guy who groks what's really going on.
Honestly it's a great name for a search engine or AI. And now he's actively ruining it like everything else he touches.
BTW, Stranger in a Strange Land is an excellent book. I laugh when people call Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers. "So, how about that hippie book?" Heinlein's books examine various government and economic systems, "What if it worked this way?"
Funny you say that. In Serbia, they say the noise a pig makes is "grok". My wife burst out laughing when she found out the name of Elon's AI.
Imagine some Saudi prince launches an AI called Oink, and then sets up Oinkepedia
I always assumed Grok was chosen to hint as his technology background. For which "grok" is a popular term used for reading and understanding, with code in particular.
It's a Heinlein - "stranger in a strange land" concept. It sort of spread out in nerdery from there where it meant you know and you're in the know.
To know is to understand fully sort of. He's doing the literal opposite which is a bit 1984 of him and is also likely another book he's read and didn't understand or at least had pretended to have read.
Rather ironic given that wikipedia makes a massive portion of LLM training corpus
Not to mention most Grokipedia pages are straight copied from Wikipedia!
Didn't there used to be conservapedia that was just Wikipedia but edited to match their imagined reality?
... I really hoped that this wasn't a thing, but im not surprised in the least.

Its just fucking painful, man.

That site is bugfuck nuts, and not just because I disagree with most conservative positions. Bug. Fuck. Nuts.
Tge thing with conservapedia is Poe's law makes it impossible to moderate. A conservative (heh) estimate is that 70% of that site is trolling.
Funny how the "voting irregularities" magically disappeared when he won.
A thief doesn't loudly announce that they just stole something.
They forgot the quotes on "fact checked" and maybe a wink emoji at the end of that sentence
Prior criminal convictions matter to you, eh, Elon? You know Trump has 34 of them, right?
If you have to create a wikipedia alternative to stop being fact checked, then maybe you are just fuckin wrong.
Billionaires: "No, No.. I can't be wrong. I'm Rich! I'll create a microcosm of information that warps reality to make sure I'm right!"
Conservapedia: Wait..thats what I was for.. what about me?!
Reality has a well known liberal bias
true,they lean neutral.
So why didn't Conservapedia take off? If it's unbiased truth, no liberal agenda, it should have blown Wikipedia out of the water a decade ago. Funny that.
"We have compiled the largest website full of absolute bullshit and stupidity to compete against the largest compendium of real human knowledge."
That dipshit really doesn't have any understanding of what the word grok actually means.



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