Elon Musk to SpaceX employees: You will be the ‘parents’ of AI

Elon Musk, in a recent SpaceX company town hall, urged employees to serve as the "parents" of the company's artificial intelligence (AI) model known as Grok. Speaking to staff, Musk explained that Grok would be trained using internal corporate communications, staff data, and workplace contributions, effectively making employees the source of the AI's knowledge and values.

Musk stated, "We're going to be training Grok on the sum total of all SpaceX information. So in a way, it will be trained on you. You will effectively be the parents of the AI. It will inherit your thoughts and ideas and beliefs, and I think that's a good thing." The exact categories of internal communications, software logs, or employee metrics to be used for training Grok were not specified, nor were the privacy protocols governing the datasets.

This strategy of utilizing internal enterprise data to train AI models is not unique to SpaceX, as other major tech companies have also been collecting workplace data to build AI agents capable of navigating desktop software, automating administrative tasks, and generating code autonomously. The push for expanding the Grok AI ecosystem aligns with SpaceX's broader efforts to integrate AI capabilities following its acquisition of xAI and the recent launch of Grok Bot, an autonomous agent designed to log into web platforms, draft emails, and generate software code.

SpaceX is also in the final stages of acquiring AI coding platform Cursor for an estimated $60 billion, further bolstering its technical capabilities. Musk encouraged employees across departments to actively test and refine internal Grok tools during the town hall meeting.