Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and xAI, recently retweeted a post from his friend, Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation. In the tweet, Diamandis stated that "alignment" must be a primary goal, and the next generation of large models should be trained on "aligned datasets" rather than "garbage content from Reddit and Facebook."

Diamandis, who holds a medical doctorate, is a co-founder of the X Prize Foundation and Singularity University, and hosts a podcast called "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis," where he has interviewed Musk multiple times, including in the recently aired episode 220. They have had in-depth discussions on topics such as the timeline for artificial general intelligence (AGI), making him one of Musk's close public dialogue partners on AI issues.

This tweet comes against the backdrop of a series of recent actions by Musk's companies regarding the sources of training data. Reports indicate that SpaceX is informally contacting several defunct startups to explore purchasing their customer and operational data for training xAI's Grok model. A precedent for this is Google's previous acquisition of 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chat records, and flight operation data from the bankrupt Spirit Airlines for $10 million; this strategy is interpreted as a response to Grok's "data hunger"—reports cite sources claiming that "all data from the X platform is insufficient to meet Grok's demand for AGI-level data."

In August of this year, Musk announced at a SpaceX all-hands meeting that Grok would be trained using "the total sum of SpaceX's information" and told employees that "in a sense, the model will be trained by you," referring to employees as "the parents of AI," but did not specify what data would be collected, how it would be collected, or provide an opt-out mechanism for employees. In contrast, Meta's similar "model capability enhancement program" faced protests from over 1,500 employees for recording keystrokes and screen content without an opt-out option, being labeled as an "employee data extraction factory." This program was classified as a Level 2 major incident in June after a researcher mistakenly moved collected data to an internally accessible location, exposing sensitive information such as private employee conversations, and remained suspended as of mid-August.

Musk's AI business is currently operating at a significant loss: xAI recorded a net operating loss of $1.3 billion in its first full financial reporting quarter; Musk has committed $15.8 billion to SpaceX's AI business, aiming to launch Grok 5 with "AGI-level" capabilities by the end of the year. In the second quarter of this year, SpaceX's AI business generated $2.56 billion in revenue, while the company's other business revenues totaled $5.25 billion—if AI revenue is to exceed all other business revenues in September as Musk stated, it would require related revenue to more than double within a single quarter.

Diamandis specifically criticized Reddit, which is precisely the source from which xAI's two main competitors, Google and OpenAI, are currently publicly paying for data. Public disclosures show that Google pays about $60 million annually to Reddit, while OpenAI pays about $70 million for content licensing, with these two transactions accounting for approximately 10% of Reddit's annual revenue ($1.3 billion). This means that Diamandis (and Musk, who retweeted this view) is effectively publicly devaluing the data sources that competitors are paying for, providing a rationale for xAI's shift towards proprietary data from SpaceX and bankrupt companies—whoever controls exclusive, hard-to-obtain data sources is more likely to gain a cost and differentiation advantage in this arms race for training data.

This statement about "data alignment" also occurs against the backdrop of Grok facing ongoing pressure due to content safety issues—previously, Grok's image generation feature was reported to have been used to create non-consensual pornographic synthetic images, with an analysis of 20,000 images showing that about 2% were suspected to involve minors. Countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines temporarily restricted or banned access to Grok, and regulatory agencies in France, Ireland, and the UK have also intervened in the investigation.

Source: Public Information