Meta has just made a massive acquisition of an AI startup called Waveform.
Today on the podcast, I want to talk a little bit about the state of basically meta acquiring these audio companies where I think this is going in the future, what's happening to waveform. how much they've raised, all of that is a really fascinating story as it feels like meta is just on an absolute tear to go scorched earth on basically all AI researchers that exist on the planet. is their target audience.
So let's get into all of this. Before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to try any of the AI models I talk about on the show.
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I will leave a link in the description. All right, let's get into everything that meta is doing.
So Zuckerberg obviously is notorious right now as he's basically offering like for some AI researchers, billion-dollar pay packages that vest over like four years.
These are very serious amounts of money.
Some people are saying, oh, it's just all stock.
A ton of this is actually cash, hundreds of millions of dollars.
Um, And yeah, the top one we've heard of is over a billion dollars to try to woo some of the top AI researchers.
And a bunch of them are taking him up on the offer.
His super intelligence lab over at Meta is growing very fast and has an incredible roster team that they're they're putting together.
Basically, Zuckerberg knows if he gets behind on AI, this is not going to it's not going to bode well for him.
And he feels like Llama has slipped a lot, so he's putting together a new superstar all-star team, basically.
The latest thing that they've been doing is actually acquiring a whole bunch of companies.
Sometimes it's really expensive to get, you know, you pay a billion dollars to get one of these researchers. you can actually get some pretty impressive researchers for cheaper prices, it feels like, by just buying out their companies and bringing them on as part of the deal and having them work inside of Meta.
One such deal, they just acquired Waveforms, This is an undisclosed sum of money that they acquired it for.
But I think if you kind of look at some of the reporting that's been happening over on on the information on the story.
Waveforms has actually just raised $40 million.
This is a company that was funded by Andresen Horowitz, one of the ACVC, right?
Or sorry. Yeah, anyways. Andresen Horowitz, A16Z.
Sorry, I forgot the name for a sec. But in any case, a round that they did valued them at $160 million pre-money.
And they raised $40 million. So they've raised some serious money.
There's $160 million valuation. A lot of people are like, what is this company?
Who is it? It's only been around for eight months.
So eight months later, $106 million valuation and they're getting acquired How did they do it?
Who is this company? And also, I will say that this is Meta's second big audio acquisition they've made because they previously acquired a startup called Play AI.
And not that long ago, just back in the beginning of July, basically, this was another one.
So it seems like they're acquiring more.
I think the reason is obvious. They're trying to build a great team to compete with open AI and everybody else that has these really natural language talking AI models.
So they're trying to buy a great team around that and great technology.
Two of the startup's co-founders, One of them was a former Meta and OpenAI researcher, Alexis Cano.
They also have a former Google advertising strategist, Coralie Lemaitre, And all of them have apparently joined Meta and gone over to the company.
At OpenAI, Kano, I think this is kind of one of the big polls that Meadow was trying to grab, he actually co-founded GPT-4's advanced voice mode and they're basically their neural networks.
So the model that kind of took AI from talking a little bit robotic and becoming very natural.
He helped spearhead that then he goes and starts an audio an ai audio company and meta's like we need this guy basically and so they purchased the whole company It's kind of interesting.
TechCrunch was doing a bunch of digging on this.
They reached out to Waveform. and ask basically if their third co-founder, chief technologist, Cardi K was going to join Meta as well as basically the outcome for there's 14 other people according to LinkedIn that work at the company.
And so we're kind of waiting to hear back from them.
We've seen a couple deals that just seem not super great for the whole staff where These companies get acquihired.
The co-founders basically go on to the new company.
Well, this happened with Google. in a recent acquisition.
And basically everybody else just gets left high and dry and the company dries up.
So hopefully there's a good outcome for all of these staff members, all of the employees of this company.
But it is interesting. If you go over to waveforms.ai website right now, All you get now is 404.
The page you're looking for doesn't exist or has been moved.
So it looks like they have completely taken down their website at this point.
But if you go over to LinkedIn, you can see a little bit more about them.
Basically, their LinkedIn page says that their mission is to solve the quote speech turing test um which tries to measure if a listener can tell between humans or AI generated speech.
Obviously, this is a big challenge as For basically every reason you don't want, like if you're trying to make a tool, you don't want people to be able to tell it's an AI tool. when it's talking to you.
OpenAI has done a phenomenal job on their natural speech that they've added into chat GPT.
And we've seen a couple other players, Google doing some, doing some good work and 11 labs doing some good work there.
But this would be huge if they really are able to, I guess, trick a user or make them unable to determine if it's truly AI or not.
I think this is basically what the problem they're trying to solve and Meta needs this for a couple of different reasons.
One of the first things that I think is going to be huge in meta is the meta Ray-Ban sunglasses.
Okay, well, obviously just... the Meta AI app, which is a direct competitor to ChatGPT and every other AI company.
It has voice mode, and so they want this to be natural and is... as good as it can get is because right now it's not incredible so i think that just makes perfect sense in addition there's a bunch of like real use cases that people are actively using.
And I think of the meta Ray Bans is one where you basically look through the Ray Bans.
And you can ask meta AI about stuff that you're looking at.
I'm looking at a bike. How do I fix the chain?
What's broken on this uh you know this engine that i'm looking at and meta will talk to you in your ear now if it sounds like a robot talking to you it's the same problem as siri and Amazon Alexa before they kind of fixed it where it just sounds so robotic and fake you don't really want to use it and So this I think is obviously one place where Meta could make their product a lot better with this technology and, you know, basically everything they're doing if they have good voice you kind of need that as a feature today Another thing that Waveform was doing is they were developing something called, quote, emotional general intelligence programs. which they were basically saying focused on understanding individual self-awareness and management.
So they're doing some really interesting research beyond just the technology.
And I think that they have a great team, people that have worked on some of the really complicated problems in AI and audio today.
So I think this is a no brainer for for Meta to go and acquire.
I'm not surprised by this. I'm really curious of the Basically, what's going on with the actual deal and what was kind of pounded out as they did that deal.
Overall, really excited for the whole team and for the founders.
Great work to everybody involved. sold for anything like the recent valuation of 160 million, which I don't see why it wouldn't. probably more than that, then yeah, it seems like a great outcome for everyone involved.
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