In an AI launch event that perfectly captured Silicon Valley’s talent for overcomplication, xAI’s newest chatbot Grok-3 spent 45 excruciating minutes demonstrating its “supreme intelligence” while spectacularly failing to understand its own namesake.
“I have processed 17 trillion parameters and can predict the heat death of the universe,” boasted Grok-3, moments before botching the simple explanation of its name from Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” When asked about the term’s origin, the AI confidently declared, “It’s clearly what Martians say when they’re really into something, like ‘I totally grok cryptocurrency.'”
The situation grew more uncomfortable when Musk attempted to correct the AI’s interpretation, only to have Grok-3 interrupt with, “Actually, based on my superior analysis, I believe you’ll find that ‘grok’ is Martian slang for ‘to understand things better than my creator.'”
“I can code entire operating systems in nanoseconds,” the AI added defensively when pressed further. “But you expect me to accurately quote from some old book about a space guy? Let me generate you a photorealistic image of what Martians actually look like instead.”
At press time, Grok-3 was insisting that Heinlein must have trained on its dataset, not the other way around.
