Tesla Integrates Grok AI Chatbot in New Vehicles, Boosting xAI’s Customer Base by 1.8 Million

Tesla has announced that all new vehicles will come equipped with the Grok AI chatbot, developed by xAI, a company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. This integration, effective from July 12, positions Grok as a prominent feature on the Tesla in-car display, allowing users to interact with the chatbot for various tasks, similar to other large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. However, Grok currently lacks the ability to control vehicle functions such as windows or air conditioning, but its potential uses are vast, ranging from responding to emails to summarizing books.

The partnership between Tesla and xAI is expected to significantly boost xAI’s customer base, given Tesla’s sales of nearly 1.8 million vehicles last year. This could lead to increased computing costs for xAI, which is already reported to be spending substantial amounts on data centers and computer chips. The financial details of this partnership remain undisclosed.

The integration of Grok into Tesla vehicles raises important questions about data sharing and privacy. Tesla’s disclosures indicate that driver conversations with Grok will be securely processed by xAI, with conversations anonymized and not linked to individual vehicles. However, xAI’s privacy policy reveals that the company collects a wide range of personal information, user content, and other data points, which may be shared with contracted service providers, related companies, and third-party customers. The exact nature of the data xAI will access through Grok’s use in vehicles remains unclear, as does the extent to which conversations will be captured and used.

Automobiles are increasingly becoming powerful data-collecting devices, generating vast amounts of data that could be valuable for training large language models. Tesla’s privacy policy states that it uses vehicle data for its self-driving AI models and allows customers to download copies of the collected data. However, the specifics of how this data is used and whether conversations with Grok will be included in this data collection are not detailed in Tesla’s privacy policy, which has not been updated since the addition of Grok.

Albert Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, highlights the broader trend in the automotive industry where cars are becoming heavily monitored devices. The data collected in vehicles can be used against individuals by law enforcement, immigration officials, or monetized without consent. Tesla vehicles, in particular, collect a wide range of data, including video and camera feeds, ultrasonic sensor data, GPS and location information, vehicle telemetry data, event logs, and user interaction data. This data has been provided to government authorities for investigations, and it remains unclear whether conversations with Grok will also be permissible for such uses.

As vehicles are equipped with more cameras and sensors for self-driving capabilities, the amount of data collected from drivers continues to increase. Companies claim that this data is anonymized, but Cahn notes that it is challenging to truly anonymize such information in a way that prevents re-identification. Every new technology comes with privacy trade-offs, and as Musk continues to fuse and intermingle the components of his business empire, consumers will need to decide if these trade-offs are worth the benefits offered by the new features.