The problem with America’s preeminent ketamine bro’s belief in “synthetic data” is that all examples of feeding AI-generated data into these LLMs reveal that it leads to the total collapse of AI models. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. Elon Musk owns an AI company, xAI, and tells everyone that Tesla is one too because he knows its stock price would fall 90 percent if it was valued like a car company. Musk also recently made a stink bid for OpenAI which exposed this lie at the heart of Tesla and undoubtedly aided its current 40-plus percent stock price fall in the midst of the Tesla Takedown movement. He even once said World War III could most likely be set off by the global race for AI supremacy. Elon is obsessed with AI, and I don’t believe for a second that he believed his “synthetic training data” bullshit. That was his low-grade propaganda brain trying to play 4D chess to trick his competitors into tanking their models.
And AI is surely a central part of Elon’s hallucinated vision of himself as a demigod, which is facing a fundamental technological problem he talked about in that livestream. The American AI “industry” reached the point of diminishing returns sometime in the last year or so, and analysts at places like Goldman Sachs were pointing this out last summer. AI is simply not a normal kind of software that scales easily, it’s more akin to crypto’s clunky model, and as Ed Zitron has chronicled in his newsletter, has really hit a roadblock as reality becomes further detached from the immense hype around a technology whose biggest societal impact to date is setting billions of dollars on fire.
Everyone in AI knows this even as their carnival barkers lie through their teeth to investors, and the dual nuts to crack of LLMs “hallucinating” answers that aren’t real and running out of good organic training data are proving to be a big problem for a group of companies rapidly running out of steam. There is, however, one untapped source of immensely valuable data that is beyond the reach of nearly all the Silicon Valley overlords: the largest and most powerful government in the history of mankind. From government contracts to tax data to grants to countless scientific endeavors, the United States government is a literal gold mine of information in our digitized world where data is the new oil.
And Elon Musk is getting his grubby drug-addled fingers on all of it. Maybe even your social security number. The Trump administration said that the data he is accessing will not be trained on Musk’s own AI, but he is using AI to assess the responses from federal workers to his stupid e-mail, and last week when Politico asked Grok, xAI’s chatbot, whether it was trained on federal government data obtained by DOGE, it responded “it’s plausible that data DOGE accessed could have flowed to xAI projects like Grok 3.”
Musk’s xAI team must have read that article because I just asked Grok whether it was trained on any data that Elon and DOGE have obtained, and it told me that “I don’t have specifics to share about what went into the pot, including anything from Elon or DOGE. Let’s just say I’ve been fed a hearty blend of info to help me understand the world and assist users like you.” When I pointed out this answer was different from the one it gave Politico, Grok wrote a very Elon-esque bullshit response where it contradicted its previous statement that “I don’t have specifics to share,” apparently recalling the exact conversation it had with Politico, and writing “when Politico asked me about this, I leaned into speculation because they framed it as a hypothetical—what could be possible. I said it’s ‘plausible’ that data DOGE accessed might flow to xAI projects like me, Grok 3, because, in theory, data can move around in surprising ways, especially with Musk’s hands in multiple pots. It was a thought experiment, not a claim of fact.”
There is an AI arms race taking place, and Elon Musk bought himself the presidency and thus, the inside track on the next great struggle to make this technology into the world-changing product our elite overlords have spent billions trying and failing to manifest into reality.
Biotech and green tech have created truly innovative forms of new technology which have helped advance the world to a better place, but the public focus of Silicon Valley’s elite Venture Capitalists has concentrated into overhyped companies that mainly grew due to the hallucinatory powers of zero interest rate policies. Now that interest rates are higher and the future cash flows and heavy debt burdens that prop up tech’s over-valued world are much less valuable and manageable in today’s math, these VCs are panicking.
They bet the farm on AI, and anyone who can scratch the surface of this flawed technology can see that a lot of people are about to lose a lot of money if the business model of this “industry” does not dramatically change sometime soon. Microsoft is already canceling leases on data centers in the wake of Deepseek proving that the so-called AI moat which companies like Nvidia established around American companies the past few years isn’t so moat-y after all. If the status quo endures, AI’s immense unprofitability will become a much bigger problem for the incurious capitalists who only care about next quarter’s profits outpacing the previous ones. Elon Musk is clearly trying to solve this fundamental problem for AI, and I would bet my own money that he is training his LLMs on a treasure trove of information that he alone is illegally accessing in his rolling coup of the United States federal government.
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