xAI Co-Founder Launches Personal AI Startup "River AI"

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder who departed Elon Musk's xAI, has launched "River AI," a new startup focused on personal AI. A veteran with experience at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, Babuschkin played a central role as a founding member of xAI. Former xAI and Tesla staff have joined the new company, which reportedly aims to develop AI agents that learn from users and remain under user control.

With departures from xAI mounting, this is arguably the highest-profile new venture to emerge from the exodus. Major tech companies are also investing heavily in the personal AI space, so how River AI plans to differentiate itself will be the key question.

Alibaba Replaces Dingtalk CEO Amid Internal Conflict Over AI Strategy

Alibaba Group has replaced Chen Hang (陳航), CEO of the groupware app "Dingtalk (钉钉)." Engineer Chen Yusen (陳宇森) will succeed him. The leadership change reportedly followed intense internal debate over Dingtalk's place in Alibaba's group-wide AI strategy. The move was announced in an internal memo, and Alibaba shares fell as much as 5.9% on the Hong Kong market after the news.

Dingtalk is widely used as a business communication platform in China, and how AI features are integrated into it directly affects the entire company's competitiveness. Whether the leadership change signals an acceleration of strategy or the beginning of turmoil, the developments ahead will be worth watching.

Anthropic CEO Amodei Calls for "Aircraft-Grade Safety Reviews" for Frontier AI

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published an essay examining AI's exponential progress and how policy should respond. In it, he warns that legislation is failing to keep pace with the technology's rapid advancement, and argues that frontier AI models should be subject to mandatory safety reviews on par with those in the aviation industry.

He also laid out concrete policy proposals, including an economic policy framework to prepare for scenarios of worsening unemployment. Amodei has long advocated stronger AI safety regulation, and these proposals extend that position — but by invoking the aviation metaphor, he has delivered an even stronger message than before.

Google Claims YouTube's Terms of Service "Already Permit" AI Music Training

Google has argued that YouTube's terms of service already permit AI to learn from music. The claim clarifies Google's legal position amid ongoing copyright lawsuits between AI companies and the music industry. The music industry has strongly opposed the unauthorized use of copyrighted works by AI companies, and litigation is underway in countries around the world.

If Google's argument prevails, the vast trove of music uploaded to YouTube could become legally available as AI training data. A backlash from creators and labels, however, is all but certain, and a legal resolution is expected to take time.

Research Highlights

"Re-reasoning" Method Improves Spatial Reasoning

Research published on Hugging Face Daily Papers proposes ReRe, a method for improving spatial reasoning accuracy. In spatial reasoning from egocentric (first-person) video, MLLMs tend to produce incorrect answers when key evidence is hidden by the camera's trajectory. ReRe first forms an initial hypothesis (Reason), then re-verifies that hypothesis using video synthesized from novel viewpoints (Re-reason). This approach reportedly delivered substantial accuracy gains in object counting and path planning.

"EvoTrainer" Evolves Autonomous Reinforcement Learning

EvoTrainer, also published on Hugging Face, is a method that co-evolves LLM policies and the training machinery (the harness). Rather than relying on a static training recipe, both change over time. The authors describe this as "the evolution of AI," suggesting a new paradigm for autonomous model improvement.

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**Sources:**

[Alibaba Dingtalk CEO Departs After AI Focus Debate](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-11/alibaba-s-dingtalk-chief-departs-after-debate-about-ai-focus?srnd=phx-technology) — Bloomberg

[xAI Co-Founder Babuschkin Unveils River AI](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-10/xai-co-founder-babuschkin-unveils-new-startup-for-personalized-ai?srnd=phx-technology) — Bloomberg

[Anthropic CEO Amodei Proposes Aircraft-Grade Safety Reviews](https://www.itmedia.co.jp/aiplus/article/2606/11/2000000081/) — ITmedia AI+

[YouTube Terms of Service Allow AI Music Training](https://www.billboard.com/pro/google-youtube-terms-of-service-ai-music-training-lawsuit/) — Billboard

[ReRe: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning](https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.11683) — Hugging Face

[EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses](https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.03108) — Hugging Face