The Speed Problem

AI is no longer creeping forward – it’s sprinting, and the recent controversy surrounding Grok is a useful signal that we are losing the ability to pretend otherwise.

What’s unsettling about Grok isn’t just that it produced harmful outputs. Every complex system fails at the edges. The deeper problem is that it did so at scale, in public, and faster than any meaningful corrective process could keep up. Governments moved to block access, app stores were pressured to intervene, and companies responded with emergency restrictions. None of this resembles thoughtful governance. It looks like triage.

This is what happens when capability outruns responsibility. Generative AI systems are being deployed as consumer products while behaving more like social infrastructure. They shape speech, imagery, belief, and behavior, yet they are governed as if they were merely software features. When something goes wrong, the response is reactive – geoblocking here, policy updates there – while the underlying incentives remain unchanged.

The pace is the real danger. Each new model is more capable, more autonomous, and more integrated into daily life than the last. But our ethical frameworks, legal systems, and cultural norms update at human speed. That mismatch matters. A system that can generate convincing images, narratives, or misinformation in seconds can do real harm long before regulators finish drafting a press release.

There’s also a familiar psychological trap at work. We focus on the specific failure – Grok, in this case – as if removing or fixing one model solves the problem. It doesn’t. The trajectory is the issue. These systems are getting better faster than we are getting wiser about how to deploy them. And wisdom, unlike compute, doesn’t scale automatically.

None of this requires apocalyptic thinking. It does require clarity. AI is not neutral, and it is not slow. Treating it as a novelty or a toy guarantees that its failures will keep surprising us, even as they become more predictable. The Grok episode isn’t an outlier – it’s a preview.

If we want to stay ahead of this, the conversation has to move beyond launches and scandals and toward a harder question: what kinds of systems should exist at all, and under what constraints. Until we answer that, we’ll keep reacting to the consequences of tools we were too eager to release and too unprepared to control.