Jonathan Ross
CEO & Founder, Groq
Nov 9, 2023
When I heard Elon Musk’s recent announcement that his company xAI is launching a chatbot inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, I decided to see if I could help him come up with a better name for the new thing.
You see, I am the founder and CEO of the company called Groq™. Our platform, the Groq Inference Engine™, is the fastest way to run Large Language Models and other generative AI language solutions. It is built on Groq’s LPU™ system. LPU systems are designed from the ground up to run fast AI. Like, lightning fast: we have many users who are already using our engine and API to run open source LLMs at speeds that are up to 5 or 10X that of graphic processor-based alternatives.
When it comes to running generative or LLM-powered AI solutions, speed is paramount. It enables people to have conversations with computers using natural language and, ideally, pace, which creates massive new opportunities for businesses and organizations to use AI to transform their markets and tackle big challenges. That’s something even Ford Prefect can grok.
If you heard Elon’s announcement, you may recall that he is touting his new creation as a bot with a bit of wit and sarcasm. He chose to call this chatbot a name which is phonetically identical to our company’s name and trademark. We found this flattering, amusing, and, um, not fjord*.
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.
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.
While we’re making suggestions to Mr. Musk about his new chatbot, here’s another one. How about running it on the Groq Inference Engine? Because the best wit and sarcasm is quick, and there is no inference engine in the world, or indeed the entire galaxy, that is quicker than Groq’s. #GroqOn
Jonathan Ross
CEO & Founder, Groq
*The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a 1979 book by British humorist Douglas Adams. The story posits that planet Earth is a giant supercomputer created to answer the question of life, the universe, and everything. Unfortunately it is demolished to make way for a galactic superhighway before it has a chance to respond. According to the guide, “fjord” is a slang term citizens of the universe use in roughly the same way we humans use “cool”, as in “that spaceship is really fjord.” We discover the answer is 42. Which leads one to wonder, what was the question?