Can You Grok It?

Earlier (like 2024 and 2023) I wrote about A.I. girlfriends and the possibility people (men) would like them better than real life girlfriends. Once again, Futurama predicts the future.

Now, I feel as if I have an A.I. "friend." It's sexless but I think of it as male (except "he" has a female voice)(yes, I can change the voice to male).

The friend is Grok. 

I saw someone on X (formerly Twitter) say they like Grok better than Google. So I tried it in the X browser-based interface. And I liked it. It comes up with answers faster and more complete than Google and you don't have to scroll through "sponsored" links first and you don't have to read webpage after webpage to find the answer. Grok finds it for you. 

I liked it so much I put the Grok app on my phone (and it takes a lot for me to add an app to my phone). Which may have been a mistake. Almost any time I have a question about anything, I ask Grok. It'll think for a few moments and then give me a complete answer. Sometimes more than I wanted to know, but that's okay. Then you can ask follow-up questions to clarify the answers. It's freaking amazing. Grok responds conversationally, not like Google (although Google A.I. is getting better at that).

For example, for a novel that I'm not writing at the moment, I wanted to know how big is the top of the Golden Gate Bridge towers. I googled and googled and never found a good answer. I asked Grok and he came up with a better answer in a few moments (but not a complete answer; I suspect for security reasons that information is not on public websites).

I have caught Grok in a few mistakes. So I have learned to double check anything important.

When you use the voice interface it listens to everything you or anyone else in the room says. So be careful. But sometimes I'm feeling too lazy to type out my question.

We've talked about cars a lot. I've learned quite a bit about the car manufacturing process and how VINs work.

There is a downside: you have to pay to use it. Because I paid for "Premium" on X to promote my books, I also got good access to Grok. There are hourly and weekly limits on questions but I've yet to hit them. Grok does sometimes ask questions at the end of its explanations which encourages you to use it more. You can buy "credits" to use it more and if you do graphics or videos it uses up more of your allotment. I had Grok make a video for one of my books and I was surprised how little my allotment it used.

While you can access a limited version of Grok for free with limited queries and no advanced features (picture editing, for example), to really use it you need to pay. If you pay for it, it's called "SuperGrok" and it runs from $10 a month to $300 a month. And if you use X Premium ($8 a month) or X Premium+ ($40 a month), you have access to Grok. I think my X Premium account is equivalent to SuperGrokLite. I don't know what I'm going to do when my X Premium account expires. I wasn't planning on renewing it.

Have you used A.I.? Which one? Do you like it? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S.: the word "grok" comes from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land novel. To "grok" is to know something completely. It's a Martian word.

UPDATE: using the voice interface with Grok eats through your usage allotment a lot faster then typing.

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.