GROK: THE NEW ANIMAL ON THE BLOCK

DR. ASOKE K. LAHA
Chairman-Emeritus and Founder InterraIT

The other day, a friend of mine complained that he had a sleepless night. He told me that at the instance of a close friend, throughout the night, he was interacting with GROK, the chatbot, a generative AI-driven platform that has captured the imagination of all - politicians, businessmen, people occupying high ranking positions, film actors, and ordinary folks.

I asked why he wanted to pose so many questions on the virtual platform and how he knew the questions that were put across were answered correctly. He did not have a clear answer for that, and yet the responses that he had received from GROK were not very illuminating for him. I did not ask him any further questions, thinking it would be an invasion of his privacy, nor did he show an interest in sharing the questions he asked.

I recall writing a few columns on AI on this platform, and I tried to see each column was different from the other in its subject matter, whether it was ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or varied applications of AI. I feel there is no end to that since the traction AI is getting is growing by leaps and bounds, and its uses and applications are proliferating.

Elon Musk’s company, which has a huge presence in the global media for various reasons, developed the Chatbot and launched it in 2023 as a large language model and named it after an imaginary character in the 1961 science fiction Stranger in a Strange Land. The story is that of an alien who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on Planet Mars. I am sure many of our esteemed readers would have read the novel and seen a few movies that were made in various languages, including a blockbuster with Amir Khan.

While reading about GROK and its responses laced with humour, which at times become sarcastic, I was imbued with a few thoughts, which I would share with my esteemed readers. I wanted to know how GROK communicates. It offers a variety of features, such as summarizing websites from the cloud and translating them into different languages. Summarising the contents of websites is not an easy task within seconds. Python coding enables quick data mining and fast analysis. Many feel that configuration-wise it is a class above the most recent version of ChatGPT because of its added features. I have a feeling that the next generation of GROK may be more powerful than the present one, and it may have the added advantages that can be used for several applications.

Secondly, GROK will motivate another group to come out with another sophisticated version, which can be an improvisation and have new features. It can be in terms of cutting down the time for data mining and giving responses, or it can be accurate in giving responses and predictions. For certain, GROK is not the last one that is going to be there in the language landscape. There will be many more such disruptions that are awaiting.

I am taken by a strange feeling; amidst all these developments, what is the relevance of language? Translation from one language to the other is not a new thing. Print translation used to take time and was a laborious process of knowing the language, semantics, context, etc. But simultaneous oral translation is still in vogue for meetings where people from different nationalities attend. Possibly, such endeavours may have limitations that can happen due to non-familiarization of accent or due to human error. These things can be taken care of by a coded machine, which can help give a more accurate outcome.

If such breakthroughs are happening on the language front, why should we impose languages on people? For instance, I feel a button-like instrument that can be inserted in the ear for accessing translative mode from any language may be a possibility soon. It is not necessary to know Japanese or Mandarin to transact business either in Japan or China. Against this backdrop, I wonder why so much talk, action, and friction on the ideal language formula, which is eluding a consensus in the Indian context. Should we not focus on more development issues, putting these matters on the backburner?

The other thought that is haunting me is about the name GROK. It is an imaginary name from science fiction. I am reminded of Jules Verne, a science fiction writer, who long ago predicted that man would land on the Moon, taking away the mystical appeal of the planet. That became a reality later. Now, the concept of Man from Mars is an imaginary one. When will that become a real one? I am not the only one who is propounding that theory. There are many, including top scientists, who share that view. Somewhere in the universe, there will be a planet like Earth where humans exist. It may be in the same form or a different shape and format with variations in physical form.

It is not a new idea. For millennia, people believed in supernatural life, and that fired their imagination, which gave rise to many literary creations. I always feel that the concept of the future world germinates first among the storytellers and later becomes a reality.
Coming back to AI, I feel the obsession with AI will continue and guide us to a new and innovative paradigm, which we thought a century ago could exist only in fairy and dreamlands. These are becoming realities now in one form or the other.

And yet, with all these technological developments, I yearn to see a world free from friction and tension, where human values are respected and given primacy. Will that ever come? I do not know because the world that boasts of superlative innovations and discoveries also witnesses happenings that are primitive, such as the recent earthquake in Thailand and Myanmar, which stole precious lives and made millions homeless and living on the brink. That is the paradox: the anachronistic co-existence of most modern transformative concepts like AI and tectonic happenings like earthquakes that sow seeds of misery in the world. That is the cardinal principle of existence, which humanity cannot get rid of.