Elon Musk Will Train His AI Project Using Your Tweets

Elon Musk will use Twitter data to build and train an AI to counter ChatGPT.

He mentioned the plan during a Friday Twitter Spaces discussion that shared more details about his plans for xAI, his newest startup. 

“Every organization doing AI, large and small, has used Twitter’s data for training, basically in all cases illegally,” he said(Opens in a new window), later adding: “We had multiple entities scraping every tweet ever made, and trying to do so in a span of days.”

Twitter recently imposed rate limits to prevent companies from scraping data from the platform. However, Musk plans on opening up the tweet access for xAI. “We will use the public tweets —obviously not anything private— for training as well just like everyone else has,” he said. 

Twitter’s data is valuable for AI companies because the user-generated content is fresh and covers a variety of topics using text that could help chatbots better mimic human speech.    

It’s also possible the data could help xAI’s own forthcoming chatbot produce more accurate responses, thanks to Twitter’s Community Notes feature, which lets users flag misleading tweets by providing additional context. However, training an AI with tweets could spark lawsuits and regulatory issues. Earlier this week, the FTC told OpenAI it’s investigating the company for potentially violating user privacy by collecting data from across the internet to train ChatGPT. 

Musk was vague on what xAI is creating. But he said the startup’s goal is to develop a “useful AI” for both consumers and businesses. Meanwhile, the long-term vision is to develop an AGI or artificial intelligence that can solve a wide-range of tasks, like a human can.  

“We are definitely the competition,” he said, referencing OpenAI and Google, which released its Bard chatbot earlier this year. “You don’t want to have a unipolar world, where just one company kind of dominates in AI.” 

However, he also emphasized his forthcoming AI will “pursue the truth.” Although rival chatbots have been programmed with content moderation in mind, Musk previously criticized ChatGPT as a propaganda machine focused on political correctness. During the Twitter Spaces discussion, Musk reiterated his concerns. 

“At xAI we have to let the AI say what it really believes is true, and not be deceptive or politically correct,” he said. Musk then compared the danger to the AI computer that goes insane in the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and kills the crew. “Where did things go wrong in Space Odyssey? Basically, when they told HAL 9000 to lie.”

Musk has recruited almost a dozen engineers and researchers from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI to help him run the San Francisco-based xAI. The startup hopes to share more information about its “first release” in the coming weeks.