grok – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Wait, Grimes Also Has An AI Toy Called Grok?

from the do-you-grok-it? dept

Oh boy. We’ve already written a few times about Elon Musk’s “Grok” AI from his company xAI, which may or may not be a part of ExTwitter or possibly Tesla, but no one really knows because all of Elon’s companies blend together in a mishmash of hell for anyone who believes in good, normal corporate governance. Specifically, we’ve covered how he’s facing a kinda serious trademark issue with Groq, a well-established AI chip company that has a trademark on the name Groq for use in artificial intelligence (and, no the different spelling doesn’t matter under trademark law).

And now there’s news that there’s a separate Grok AI situation that he faces… this one coming from his ex (he sure does love his “x’s” huh?) Grimes. Apparently there’s a toy startup, named Curio that has teamed up with Grimes to make an AI-powered toy named Grok (I swear this is a sentence that makes sense).

A glimpse toward this future is beginning to emerge in products like Grok, an AI-powered plush toy in the shape of a rocket that can converse with your child. Grok is the first product from a Silicon Valley start-up called Curio that is leveraging Open AI’s technology on a line of toys Curio’s founders say will be capable of long-running, fully interactive conversation, allowing a child to view it almost as a peer or friend.

Canadian musician Claire Boucher, known as Grimes and the mother of three of Elon Musk’s children, is an investor in and adviser to the company, and she will provide the toy’s voice.

“Every [change] in technology unlocks new forms of entertainment,” said Sam Eaton, president and chief toy maker at Curio, who was previously an engineer at Roblox, the gaming platform. “It’s a different level of immersion for playtime.”

And, yes, Curio apparently filed for a trademark on the word Grok as well in September, but in the category of “electronic learning toys” or “plush toys” so it’s not clear it will conflict. For what it’s worth xAI also filed for trademarks on Grok, one on October 23 and the other on November 7 of this year.

There’s also, um, this:

Sallee said that the toy was designed with Grimes’s children in mind and that they have a friendly relationship with it. “The toy was designed for X and the other kids,” she said, referring to the son of Grimes and Musk, X Æ A-Xii, “but X primarily because he’s of age where he can actually talk to the toy and it can talk back more effectively.”

But the toy has no relationship with Musk’s AI start-up, which also is called Grok. Curio holds the trademark on the name, and the two AI products are totally unaffiliated, Curio says. The name Grok was devised by Grimes and the Curio team, who said the word was a shortening of the word Grocket, which was coined because Grimes’ children are exposed to a lot of rockets through their father’s ownership of SpaceX.

As far as I can tell, it’s false that they “hold the trademark” on it. It’s only an application at this point, which makes it pending. I do not see a fully registered trademark on “Grok” for either company (and it wouldn’t surprise me if Groq opposed one or both trademarks).

Also, it seems… mighty convenient for this claim that “Grok” here is short for “Grocket” (especially since then wouldn’t it be called Grock?) but I guess I’ll let the two exes battle that one out among themselves.

Filed Under: elon musk, grimes, grok, toys, trademark
Companies: curio, groq, twitter, x, xai

Groq Sends Elon’s ‘Grok’ A Cease & Desist, Though A Funny One

from the the-likelihood-of-confusion dept

One of things we enjoy here at Techdirt is when even those with legitimate gripes about trademark law take a bemused view about the whole thing, rather than immediately jumping to angry and overly aggressive threats. No one likes a trademark bully, even when the trademark holder might have a legitimate claim.

A few weeks ago, we mentioned that Elon Musk probably should have checked with trademark lawyers (or just done a basic internet search) before naming his xAI large language model “Grok” because there was already a well-known AI chip company in the space named Groq. Groq seems mildly annoyed at the confusion this is causing (and literally yesterday when I mentioned testing something on Groq’s AI system someone asked me why I was using Elon’s AI…), but is mostly taking it in good strides.

Initially, Groq’s CEO, Jonathan Ross (who was the guest on this week’s Techdirt podcast, which was entertaining) used his own AI tools to suggest a new name for Elon’s LLM. The solution they came up with was Slartibartfast, which (unlike “Grok”) is actually from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which Elon keeps insisting is what his AI is trained to be like.

Then Ross used the situation to highlight just how much faster AI running on Groq’s chips are, compared to using the old, tired, slow way that Elon’s appears to be using:

Now, Ross has taken it up a notch with a clearer cease and desist, though still keeping it amusing.

Did you know that when you announced the new xAI chatbot, you used our name? Your chatbot is called Grok and our company is called Groq, so you can see how this might create confusion among people. Groq (us) sounds a lot like (identical) to Grok (you), and the difference of one consonant (q, k) only matters to scrabblers and spell checkers. Plus, we own the trademark.

We can see why you might want to adopt our name. You like fast things (rockets, hyperloops, one-letter company names) and our product, the Groq LPU™ Inference Engine, is the fastest way to run large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI applications. However, we must ask you to please choose another name, and fast.

I stand by my recommendation to name it Slartibartfast. It’s both on message with your idea of a sarcastic bot inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and sounds sufficiently distinct from any other AI company or product (which is why I wouldn’t recommend calling it Giggle or OpenXi). Win-win! But, your call.

In making this request, we’re thinking about you as much as us. It must be annoying having all those people hitting you up on X, asking how the Groq LPU Inference Engine is able to deliver 10X better performance and precision at scale? Or how it is 10X more energy efficient and 10X more cost-effective? That’s plenty of Xs, even for you, especially when it’s not your Groq.

I get it. It was annoying when my great Aunt asked me about my new snarky chatbot over Thanksgiving dinner, but I passed her the mashed potatoes anyway.

#GroqOn

Of course, Elon has (so far) ignored all of this, and there’s a decent chance he’ll continue to do so. But I’d like to no longer need to explain every time I talk about Groq (which is doing some pretty cool stuff) that I’m not using Elon’s glitchy tech, so hopefully Elon gets around to actually changing the name.

As we’ve explained for years, of the three customary fields often linked together under the terrible and misleading term “intellectual property,” trademark is the most defensible, though only for its original intended purpose: to avoid consumer confusion. As a consumer protection tool that accurately designates the origin of a product, trademark serves a useful process (it’s only when it’s being used for bullying/censorship that gets us upset). But here, Groq appears to have a very clear legitimate claim. The likelihood of confusion is extremely clear (I keep experiencing it personally!).

But, I guess it’s up to Elon if he’s actually going to change the name. He could ask Grok, but I’m guessing the responses might come a little too slowly.

Filed Under: ai, cease and desist, elon musk, grok, jonathan ross, likelihood of confusion, trademark
Companies: groq, twitter, x

Does Elon Grok The Trademark Issues With ‘Grok’? AI Chip Company Groq Does

from the grok-the-groq,-grok dept

As you likely know by now, last week, Elon Musk released the initial version of the AI chatbot he created earlier this year via “xAI” which may or may not be part of his many other companies, but definitely uses employees, technology, and resources from those other companies. He named it “Grok,” though also claimed that it was “modeled after” Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Now, anyone with any knowledge of the relevant books here will note that “grok” comes not from Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but from Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which are, well, two very different books. Others might note that the underlying theme of Hitchhiker’s Guide is that it’s actually compiled by living beings, but, hey, whatever…

There might be a bigger issue with Elon naming his AI “Grok,” beyond the mixed up book aspect.

And it’s that there’s already a big AI-related company that has been around for over six years named “Groq” that has multiple live trademarks for “Groq” having to do with AI.

By absolute and total coincidence, last week as all this happened, I just happened to be at a conference where I interviewed Groq’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, on stage, where he seemed to have a pretty good sense of humor about all this (rather than the sophomoric sense of humor of the other guy).

During that session, Jonathan demonstrated how Groq’s AI chips make existing AI models way faster than anything you’ve seen before (and, yes, it makes a huge difference — I’ve been playing around with Groq’s implementation of the Llama 2 AI model and it’s… astounding what you can do when the output is that fast. It makes using generative AI a wholly different experience).

Now, we don’t often cover things like “AI chips” on Techdirt, but we do cover AI in general and we do cover… trademark disputes. Including when the party that feels wronged takes a more creative approach to dealing with things before sending in the lawyers.

Jonathan wrote a blog post, “Welcome to Groq’s Galaxy, Elon,” in which he demos Groq’s super fast speeds by asking it to come up with a better name for Elon’s AI (he did a version of this same example demo on stage at the conference last week as well):

In the meantime, to help Elon out I decided to have a talk with our own Groq™ bot to see if we could come up with a better, wittier, and more unique name for the Musk bot. Our bot is built on the Llama-2 70B LLM and runs on the Groq Inference Engine. In other words, it’s smart and fast.

I asked it, “What are some clever names for an LLM-based chatbot inspired by the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?” In about a second, it provided an entertaining set of ideas.

This gives Ross a chance to also show off the speed of Groq’s chips, and how that enables much better overall results in a short time frame:

The list was 545 tokens in length, and if you are keeping score (which we definitely are), the speed at which it generated that list was 329 tokens / second.

But, I didn’t believe the list was up to Elon’s levels of intellect and wit. This isn’t surprising, since the first answer from any AI query is the bot’s stream of consciousness, and none of us is at our sharpest when blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. So I asked a few more questions. How could you improve these suggestions? What are the most sarcastic, snarky options? Can you give me your top three?

Which is how, in a matter of seconds, the Groq bot and I came up with a great suggestion for Elon’s latest: “Slartibartfast the Chatbot”. What a fantastical name! Slartibartfast is a character from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy whose job is to design planets (talk about generative AI!) He’s a rebel, a trickster, and a cynic. Really, the ideal character to front Elon’s and AI’s new voice of snark.

Going even snarkier (which we’re told Elon loves, right?), Ross posted another video showing Groq and “Grok” from xAI side by side responding to the same prompt.

Well, sort of. If you watch the video you see that in the time that Elon’s AI took to respond to a simple query, Groq’s system not only gave a much more complete answer in a fraction of the time, but it also was able to provide even more. And more. And more again.

Now, Groq and xAI are in different, but related businesses. Groq is making the chips that make it possible for any generative AI model to be insanely fast (their demo is on Llama 2), but they’re both in the AI business. And, yes, in case you’re wondering, since trademark law is focused on the likelihood of confusion, the difference in spelling between “Groq” and “Grok” is unlikely to matter. There are plenty of cases where phonetically similar words were found to violate trademarks.

Filed Under: ai, elon musk, grok, jonathan ross, trademark
Companies: groq, twitter, x, xai