It’s bring-your-AI-to-work day at SpaceX

TL;DR: Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. SpaceX will start training Grok on “the sum total of all SpaceX information,” including data from its employees. This kind of thing didn’t go so well for Meta, but it’s part of a broader push to harvest all the know-how human workers have to offer.

What happened: Elon Musk told his staff that they would now be AI training fodder in a company all-hands video posted to X yesterday. “You will effectively be the parents of the AI,” he declared, after praising staff for both their capability and “goodness.” “It will inherit your thoughts and ideas and beliefs, and I think that’s a good thing.”

It’s also a cheap way to get a kind of AI data that’s currently all the rage: humans performing real-life tasks to teach agents how to work autonomously. And it’s a fresh source of knowledge, since frontier AI models have already ingested practically everything books and the internet have to offer.

Musk didn’t lay out exactly how employee training data would be collected and used. It’s also not clear if staff can opt out of their work being used for training. But the SpaceX founder encouraged his employees to use the company’s AI so that they could help “make it better.”

Getting déjà vu: SpaceX isn’t the first big tech company to try this. In April, Meta told workers that their keystrokes and mouse clicks would now be captured for AI training. “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them,” a company spokesperson told the BBC at the time.

It all went downhill from there: Many employees revolted, and then tracking data leaked internally—leading Meta to pause the effort in late June.

This is just the start: SpaceX is probably hoping its attempt at collecting employee training data goes more smoothly than Meta’s, but it’s unlikely to be the last firm to try. Capturing tasks humans do is now a lucrative AI sub-industry—this kind of data lets labs create simulated environments where the models learn through trial and error, instead of memorizing static datasets.

Bottom line: Many jobs now encourage you to use AI to boost your work. But if you’re at an AI company, that helpful little agent may also be watching how you work—and taking notes. —WK

Also at SpaceX…

• Grok Bot, the company’s new AI coworking agent, has now been released in beta.