In a bizarre twist we absolutely didn’t see coming, Claire “Grimes” Boucher is teaming up with Silicon Valley toy startup Curio to bring an OpenAI-powered line of toys to market, the Washington Post reports.
Its name? Grok. Which is absolutely bizarre, considering Boucher’s ex and father of three of her children, Elon Musk, also recently released an AI chatbot of the same name.
The couple aren’t exactly on good terms these days, as they’re locked in a nasty custody battle over their three children X, with Musk seemingly trying to wriggle out of paying California child support payments, which are much steeper than the ones mandated in Texas.
And Boucher is coming to the battle with some ammunition: Curio owns the trademark to the name “Grok.”
The name Grok was supposedly short for “Grocket,” referring to Grimes’ children’s obsession with rockets (likely, to further the messy entanglement of it all, the result of their dad’s space venture SpaceX.) That’s a departure from the scifi origins of the name, which first appeared in Robert Heinlein’s 1961 book “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
“The toy was designed for X and the other kids,” Misha Sallee, Curio’s chief executive, told the WaPo, referring to Boucher’s children with Musk, “but X primarily because he’s of age where he can actually talk to the toy and it can talk back more effectively.”
As far as the company’s actual offerings are concerned, the line of toys sounds like a bit of a nightmare.
Curio promises that its fully conversational little mascots won’t be storing any voice data locally and that it’s complying with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act as far as the transcripts are concerned, which the parents can access through an app.
Nonetheless, handing a full-blown large language model-powered toy to your child arguably sounds like a terrible idea in a number of ways, considering companies like OpenAI are still actively struggling to implement effective guardrails to stop their chatbots from saying misleading things, randomly handing out sensitive data, or even producing material that’s wildly inappropriate for children.
“We’ve heard some people’s concerns like, ‘Could this replace parents?’” Sam Eaton, president and chief toy maker at Curio, told the WaPo. “But it’s the opposite. Kids are already zoned out on YouTube or tablets. This toy, you’re talking to it and it’s talking back.”
Curio will miss this year’s holiday season but its Grok is available for preorder for $99. The company is planning to ship the product early next year, according to the WaPo.
As far as Boucher’s involvement with the oddly-named toy goes, it’s hard to make out a motivation. Was she really just looking to give her son a conversational friend as his parents duke it out in court over custody? Or was she trying to take a stab at Musk’s xAI venture, which has a potty-mouthed AI of the same name?
In short, Curio’s creepy junior assistant is a bizarre cash grab of an unproven technology aimed at the most vulnerable humans in our lives — and we can’t help but feel Boucher may have an ulterior motive in all of this.
More on their custody battle: Elon Musk Drags Grimes’ Tweets Into Increasingly Nasty Custody Battle
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