Musk's AI Company Sparks Privacy Controversy: Training Smart Partner with 200 Employees' Facial Data

AIbase基地

Published in AI News · 4 minute read · Jul 23, 2025

Recently, the American publication Business Insider revealed that Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI is training its latest AI model Grok using facial data from its employees. This internal project, named "Skippy," requires employees to record their facial expressions to help Grok better understand human emotions. This move immediately raised concerns among employees, mainly regarding privacy and image rights.

According to internal documents and Slack messages, more than 200 xAI employees have participated in this project since April of this year. The project requires employees to record videos when communicating with colleagues, capturing various facial expressions and emotional reactions. The project leader stated that such training aims to help the AI identify and analyze subtle emotions expressed during communication.

However, this requirement has made many employees uneasy. Some expressed concerns about the potential risks of their images being used, and some even chose to completely withdraw from the project. Participants are required to sign a consent form granting xAI "permanent" access to these video data. Although the project team promised that these videos will only be used for training purposes and will not be used to create digital representations of individuals, employees still express concerns about potential future privacy violations.

Notably, the project has brought about innovation. xAI recently launched two virtual avatars - Ani and Rudi - which can engage in video chats with users and even display rich emotions and actions. The emergence of these two virtual characters has sparked widespread public discussion, especially because some of their performances are considered too explicit and extreme, raising ethical controversies.

Currently, an xAI spokesperson has not commented on this incident. However, it is foreseeable that as AI technology continues to advance, how to balance technological development with the protection of personal privacy will become an important challenge for major tech companies.

Kuaishou and Shanghai Jiao Tong University jointly launch the Orthus model, breaking new boundaries in multimodal generation

Kuaishou and Shanghai Jiao Tong University announced the open-source multimodal generation model Orthus at the ICML conference. The model is based on an autoregressive Transformer architecture and demonstrates excellent performance in text-image conversion tasks, with significantly improved computational efficiency compared to existing models. Orthus uses a unique architectural design, separating processing of text and image features through specific modal generation heads, and efficiently fusing them in a unified representation space. Research shows that the model outperforms professional models in image understanding and text-to-image tasks, while also demonstrating strong potential in application scenarios such as image editing, making it a breakthrough in multimodal generation.

Xunfei Xinhuo X1 Upgrade Version to Be Released Soon, Deep Reasoning Capabilities Reach New Heights

iFlytek launches Spark X1 upgrade on July 25, a Chinese AI model excelling in math, translation, and logic with fewer parameters but comparable to OpenAI/DeepSeek. Features improved accuracy, multilingual support (130+ languages), and precise responses via 'slow thinking' mode, marking a breakthrough in domestic AI tech.....

Kunlun Group Launches Music Model Mureka V7 and Audio Model Mureka TTS V1

On July 23, Kunlun Group introduced two innovative AI models to global users - the Mureka V7 Music Model and the Mureka TTS V1 Audio Model. The launch of these two models marks an important step forward in the field of AI music generation. Since its release, the Mureka V7 Music Model has attracted widespread attention, gaining extensive praise for its efficient music creation capabilities and outstanding music quality. Users simply need to input lyrics, select a style or theme, and click generate to obtain a complete and pleasant song in a short period of time.

Gupshup Raises $60 Million in Funding, Can It Return to Unicorn Status?

India's Gupshup raised $60M+ at undisclosed valuation. The 2019 unicorn, previously valued at $1.4B, saw Fidelity mark down to $486M. Funds will expand in India/Middle East and AI agents. Profitable with 3x revenue growth, targeting IPO in 18-24 months. Transitioned from SMS to AI business messaging, serving 50K clients.....

Report: Alibaba to Launch AI Glasses with Two Versions, Deeply Integrating Ecosystem to Target Mass Market

Alibaba will launch its first self-developed AI glasses this week, integrating features such as voice assistant and real-time translation, deeply integrated with Alibaba's ecosystem including Gaode and Alipay. The product uses a dual-chip architecture of Qualcomm and Horizon. It comes in a standard version and a display (AI+AR) version. This is Alibaba's first product after integrating its AI business, led by a former Huawei architect. Industry experts believe that Alibaba, leveraging its ecosystem advantages, has the potential to break through the current bottlenecks in the AI glasses market and drive the product into the mass consumer market. With major players like Xiaomi and Baidu entering the field, 2025 may become a key turning point for the development of AI glasses.

Amazon Shanghai AI Research Institute Disbands: Official Response to the Difficult Decision, Will Fully Support Employee Transition

Amazon Cloud Technology Shanghai AI Research Institute announced its disbandment on July 23. This institute was the last overseas research institute of AWS. Chief Applied Scientist Wang Minjie confirmed the news on his Moments and reflected on her six-year leadership experience. An Amazon spokesperson stated that this was a personnel reduction decision based on organizational evaluation and strategic adjustments, aiming to optimize resource investment in innovation. The news has attracted widespread attention in the industry.