SpaceX is joining the new AI gold rush: employee data.
In a company all-hands, Elon Musk told staff that SpaceX plans to train its Grok AI on the company’s data, including contributions from staff. This type of data has become a valuable commodity for tech companies training AI agents to use computers and perform real-world tasks.
“We’re going to be training Grok on the sum total of all SpaceX information,” Musk told employees in a video of the all-hands posted on X on Tuesday.
“So in a way, it will be trained on you,” he added.
The world’s richest man reiterated concerns he has been expressing for years about the risks of superintelligent AI that is not aligned with humanity’s goals.
Musk suggested that training it on data from SpaceX employees — who he described as “a collection of some of the very best humans on Earth” — could imbue future models with what he considers desirable values.
“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 SpaceX CEO said.
It is not clear what employee data SpaceX is planning to use to train its AI models, or how. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk previously raised the prospect of training Grok on SpaceX data in the company’s recent earnings call, and the rocket maker is not the only Big Tech giant eyeing employee data in the quest to improve AI models.
Having exhausted most of the readily available training data on the internet, AI companies are increasingly turning to data from employees and other sources, such as factory and sensor data, to improve their models’ ability to navigate real-world tasks.
Meta launched a new initiative in April to collect employee keystrokes and mouse movements as training data to improve the company’s AI models.
The plan sparked intense backlash from staff and was paused in June after private employee conversations and performance data were made available across the entire company, Business Insider exclusively reported.
Grok Bot
SpaceX, which absorbed Musk’s AI startup xAI months before going public in a record-breaking IPO, is attempting to catch up in the AI race. Grok has lagged behind cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Anthropic on some major benchmarks.
SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup Cursor is expected to close in the coming months. On Tuesday, SpaceX launched Grok Bot, an AI agent that is designed to perform tasks on a computer.
The company says Grok Bots can sign into apps and websites, draft emails, write code, and perform a wide range of other tasks autonomously. Training AI models to perform these kinds of agentic tasks often requires specially curated computer use data.
In the all-hands, Musk encouraged all SpaceX employees to use the company’s AI and “make it better.” The billionaire said that SpaceX’s mission to dominate AI on Earth and in space would ultimately lead to soaring profits, a golden age of civilization, and teased holidays on the moon for employees.
“Anyone at SpaceX who wants to go to the moon or Mars will be able to go in the future. You have my word,” Musk said.
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