You can track the boyhood reading habits of the tech billionaires through the names they choose for their products and services. The word grok joins a host of other words which started in science fiction, were appropriated by Silicon Valley and have since entered general parlance. Think avatar, bot, metaverse, multiverse, neural and portal.
The verb grok, meaning “to understand something at a deep level”, will not be new to science fiction fans or old-time techies (who often go together). My computer science classes in the 1980s were peppered with professors who would say things like “this might be hard to grok, so listen carefully”. The word remained largely confined to tech circles until November 2023, when Elon Musk—under the auspices of his new artificial intelligence startup xAI—made it the name of a new chatbot, hoping his creation would rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.
Robert Heinlein, a science fiction writer in the mid-20th century, coined grok in Stranger in a Strange Land. It tells the story of a young human, Valentine Michael Smith, who is raised on Mars but returns to Earth at the age of 20 to solve the ills of humanity by applying Martian values and morals. He forms a cult of (mostly female) followers and engages in group sex and free love. A character in the book explains that “grok is the most important word in Martian language... you need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok’”. Heinlein may have taken the concept from fellow author William Tenn’s similar concept of griggo, which the latter in 1949 attributed to Venusian (the language spoken on Venus in his novels). Other words coined by Heinlein include xenobiology (the study of extraterrestrial life forms) and cold sleep (a state of inactivity brought on by putting a person in a very cold environment).
When Musk was a teenager, Heinlein was his favourite author. He was thrilled when, in 2011, he was awarded the Heinlein Prize for commercial space activities. “This is one of the best awards I have ever received,” he said. “Actually, it probably is the best award.”
Musk is not the only fan of the book. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it one of 88 “Books that Shaped America”. And it certainly influenced the cult leader and criminal Charles Manson, who named his third son, Valentine Michael, after its main character, and whose “family” practised some of the Martian rituals as described in the book.
Although Musk’s Grok is playing catchup with the other AI models, which were launched earlier, it may not be long before it overtakes them and Grok becomes a household name. Musk has raised $12bn for xAI. He is about to gain power within the US government as one of the leaders of the new Department of Government Efficiency. From a tech perspective, Grok has an advantage over its rivals of being trained on yottabytes of real-time human-generated data fed directly from Musk’s various companies and powered by his massive new supercomputer, Colossus. No one else can train their models on the combination of posts from X, images and sound recordings from Tesla car cameras and satellite images from Starlink.
As Grok is imbedded in robo-taxis and humanoid bots, and integrated into our daily lives, the word will well and truly return to its science fiction etymological roots. As Heinlein wrote in 1961: “‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed—to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience.”
