XAI Begins Training Chatbot on Content From X

Elon Musk’s xAI has reportedly begun training its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok, on users’ posts on X, the social media site also owned by Musk.

X added a setting this week, available only to those accessing the social media site on the web, that says: “Allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning,” Seeking Alpha reported Friday (July 26).

This setting is not available on the app, according to the report.

On the web, the setting is on by default, but users can turn it off in the Settings menu, the report said.

Musk said in a Monday (July 22) post on X that the xAI and X teams and supporting companies got a new AI training cluster started.

In a subsequent post, he added that this AI training cluster is “training the world’s most powerful AI by every metric by December this year.”

On Tuesday (July 23), Musk posted a poll on X asking the social media site’s users if Tesla — of which he is CEO — should invest $5 billion into xAI, “assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors.”

He noted that the poll aimed to just “test the waters,” as board approval and shareholder vote are needed.

On Thursday (July 25), after two-thirds of those participating in the poll voted yes, Musk posted: “Looks like the public is in favor. Will discuss with Tesla board.”

When xAI announced the rollout of its Grok chatbot in November 2023, the company said on its website: “A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has a real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform.”

In May, xAI raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round, saying it will use the new funding to take its first products to market, build advanced infrastructure and accelerate its research and development (R&D).

The company said at the time that since Musk announced the formation of xAI in July 2023, it launched Grok-1, the Grok-1.5 model with long context capability, the Grok-1.5V model with image understanding and the open-source release of Grok-1.