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Musk trained GROK, his AI on copyright materials from The Library of Congress. The Librarian and archivist were fired for protesting.
Worse, Memphis Tennessee is the site of Musk’s Colossus computer, it uses 33 generators of Methane gas, unregulated and unauthorized by any Agency.
The Black Neighborhood where it’s located, is spewing toxic fumes and harming residents. Protect yourself and measure the quality of your air and ask the Southern Poverty Law Center to sue.
RESIST!
May 13, 2025
MAY 14READ IN APP
While President Donald Trump’s billionaire sidekick Elon Musk has said he is pulling back from his work with the “Department of Government Efficiency,” he is with Trump today in Saudi Arabia, along with representatives from leaders from some of the biggest companies in the United States. The business executives are looking for Saudi investments.
Jason Karaian of the New York Timesnotes that the Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to Musk, the AI entrepreneurs in today’s entourage include, as Karaian reports, “Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT parent OpenAI; Jensen Huang, the leader of the advanced chipmaker Nvidia; Ruth Porat, the chief investment officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company; and Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon, which is a major provider of cloud-computing services.” Cyber experts note that DOGE’s mining of Americans’ personal data under Musk has given him access to a treasure trove of verified information for his own company xAI. Karaian notes that xAI is in the process of raising money that could bring the value of the firm to $120 billion.
After the promise of $600 billion in Saudi investment in the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in AI and energy infrastructure to support it, Trump today promised Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, $142 billion in state-of-the-art defense and security equipment from dozens of U.S. defense firms.
Musk’s turn from DOGE back to AI is revealing not just in providing evidence that his primary interest all along was not in “waste, fraud, and abuse” but in collecting government data about the American people. It is not likely a coincidence that the administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last Thursday and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on Saturday. Both Hayden and Perlmutter have questioned the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train AI.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt explained Hayden’s firing by saying “[t]here were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” but the Library of Congress collects according to a list of principles to enable it to perform research for members of Congress and to keep a record of the American people. It is not a lending library. In order to conduct research at the Library of Congress, researchers must be at least 16 years old.
Musk powers his AI from a massive supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. As Dara Kerr of The Guardian reported last month, the Southern Environmental Law Center discovered that Musk had quietly moved at least 35 methane-powered generators—enough to power a city—to the plant to help power the supercomputer he calls “Colossus,” which powers his chatbot “Grok.” Those generators are unpermitted and are major producers of carcinogens and other toxins. After the company assured Memphis mayor Paul Young that only 15 of the generators were on, thermal imaging showed at least 33 running.
The supercomputer is in a historically Black neighborhood with a history of industrial pollution and higher rates of cancer and asthma than other Memphis neighborhoods. When residents spoke out against the supercomputer, a group calling itself “Facts Over Fiction” but without any other identifying information spread flyers claiming the turbines are “specially designed to protect the air we all breathe.” They also claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency and the county health department regulate the generators, but both agencies told Kerr that they had not issued permits for their use at the Memphis plant.
In March, Musk bought another property in Memphis to expand the plant by a million square feet.