Elon Musk says SpaceX is putting top Starship and Starlink engineers to work on Grok

It’s all hands on deck at SpaceX as the company plays catch-up in the AI race.

Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX had deployed “a few dozen” top Starlink and Starship engineers to help overhaul its Grok model. “The SpaceXAI cadence of model and harness improvement is speeding up tremendously, particularly due to a few dozen of the top Starlink/Starship engineers shifting much of their time to AI,” wrote Musk in a post on X.

The billionaire added that engineers from Cursor, the AI coding startup that SpaceX agreed this month to buy for $60 billion, were also working on the new foundation model, which was partly trained on Cursor training data.

Musk said that Grok 4.5, the latest version of the chatbot, was now in private beta at Tesla and SpaceX, and posted that SpaceX would release new models “trained from scratch” every month this year.

Musk’s efforts to take the lead in the AI race have faced roadblocks in the past few months.

The Tesla CEO overhauled xAI, the AI startup he founded in 2023 to take on OpenAI and Google, earlier this year in a sweeping reorganization that saw the last of the company’s 11 cofounders depart.

XAI’s Grok has lagged rival AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, especially on coding, and Musk wrote in March that xAI was “being rebuilt from the foundations up.” In February, Musk merged xAI with SpaceX, and the deal to acquire Cursor was confirmed shortly after the rocket company’s record-breaking $85 billion IPO earlier this month.

The deal cemented the meteoric rise of Cursor, an AI coding startup led by 25-year-old Michael Truell, and saw SpaceX grant Cursor access to the company’s supercomputers in return for help training Grok.

Deploying top Starlink and Starship engineers to overhaul Grok is the latest sign that SpaceX is going all in on AI.

Musk has said the company will use the windfall from its mega-IPO to build a network of up to a million orbital data centers, built on Starlink technology and carried into space by Starship, that will train and run increasingly advanced AI models.

In its investor materials presented before the IPO, SpaceX estimated its total addressable market was worth $28.5 trillion, of which AI accounts for $26.5 trillion.