Nearly four months ago, Elon Musk founded xAI with the grand aim of building a “maximally curious” and “truth-seeking” AI model that would be interested in humanity and therefore predisposed to help it survive. xAI promised more details within weeks, but kept silent until this past weekend, when it released an early version of its AI to a small group of testers.
The chatbot is called Grok, and xAI says it’s “modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was an encyclopedia of sorts in Douglas Adams’s radio-play, novel, and TV series of the same name. (A little confusingly, the term “grok”—i.e. to truly understand something—comes from a different science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.)
