Via mashable.com
Elon Musk told workers they would 'effectively be the parents of the AI' as he outlined plans to train Grok on the company's entire knowledge base
Elon Musk has a new job description for his rocket engineers: AI parents. During a recent all-hands meeting at SpaceX, Musk told employees the company plans to train its Grok AI model on the “sum total” of SpaceX’s institutional knowledge, including the work, contributions, and ideas of its workforce.
The meeting video, shared by SpaceX on X, surfaced on Tuesday morning and revealed Musk’s vision for merging the aerospace giant’s deep engineering expertise with xAI’s large language model ambitions.
Rocket scientists as AI trainers #
Musk framed the initiative in characteristically grand terms, telling employees that Grok would inherit their “thoughts and ideas and beliefs.”
“You will effectively be the parents of the AI.”
What Musk didn’t address, at least not in the publicly shared portions of the meeting, is the question of consent. No specifics were offered about what types of data would be ingested, whether employees would have opt-out mechanisms, or what guardrails would prevent sensitive technical information from leaking through model outputs.
The revenue bet behind the vision #
Musk indicated that AI-generated revenue at SpaceX is projected to surpass revenue from the company’s traditional product lines, including rockets and satellites, by September 2026.
The vehicle for this ambition is xAI, which Musk founded in July 2023. The company has been building Grok as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, initially training it on data from X (the social media platform Musk acquired in 2022). Adding SpaceX’s engineering corpus to that training pipeline would give Grok a specialized knowledge base that no competitor could easily replicate.
What this means for the AI landscape #
There’s a tension here worth watching. SpaceX operates under strict ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) controls that govern the export of defense-related technical data. How xAI plans to train on SpaceX’s engineering knowledge while maintaining compliance with those regulations is a question that regulators will likely want answered.
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