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

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.