The AI Daily Brief (Formerly The AI Breakdown): Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
Are Voice Agents the Next Big Computing Platform?
Wed, 05 Mar 2025
A new AI voice model, Sesame, is turning heads with its natural conversations, leaving many wondering if this is a turning point for AI assistants. Companies are racing to build AI-powered voice tools for customer service, sales, education, and more. Is this the future of computing, or will people resist talking to machines? Plus Anthropic raises $3.5B. Brought to you by:KPMG – Go to https://kpmg.com/ai to learn more about how KPMG can help you drive value with our AI solutions.Vanta - Simplify compliance - https://vanta.com/nlwThe Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Subscribe to the newsletter: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/Join our Discord: https://bit.ly/aibreakdown
Chapter 1: What are the latest developments in AI funding?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, a new voice model has everyone chattering about the future of voice agents. And before then in the headlines, Anthropic completes a big new raise that seems for some to be driven by one particular use case. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with Anthropic's latest raise. It is another monster round. Honestly, at this point, numbers are starting to become meaningless. Every company is raising a gajillion dollars at a Googleplex valuation.
But this one is interesting to me for a very specific reason, which is the way that at least some of their investors are framing Anthropic's focus.
So first to the details, the company raised $3.5 billion in Series E funding, led by a billion-dollar investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Salesforce, Cisco, Fidelity, General Catalyst, D1, Jane Street, Menlo, and Bessemer all participating.
Chapter 2: Why is Anthropic's new funding round significant?
Anthropic said in the most boilerplate of fundraising text, With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion.
Anthropic's valuation has now tripled since their February 2024 Series D. One year ago, the company was valued at $18 billion. The valuation is supported by skyrocketing revenue, which went 10x to hit $1 billion annualized by the end of last year.
Bloomberg sources also suggest that Anthropic have already experienced another 30% revenue boost so far this year with the release of Claude 3.7's sonnet. Certainly, it appears that there are no shortage of buyers for the foundation model companies at these mega rounds. Earlier reports had Anthropic only seeking to raise $2 billion, so it appears that an extra billion and a half was squeezed in.
The information had previously reported that Anthropic expects to burn $3 billion this year, so this funding round should see them cleanly until 2026, unless, of course, they really step on the gas. All right, now I promised at the beginning of this that there was something interesting about this to me. And it comes from this offhanded tweet from Didi Das, who is a VC at Menlo Ventures.
Didi writes, Now, of course, the caveat here is that this is just one investor's take. But the fact that he so clearly puts the value of Anthropic as tied to the specific use case of transforming and improving software engineering is really fascinating. If you asked Anthropic, they'd say that they were competing for AGI. Same way that OpenAI would say that.
Same way that Sergey Brin said that in his recent memo to Google. So the fact that you have one of these investors who's just put a bunch of money back in this company really honing in on this very specific use case is fascinating.
Making it more interesting is the fact that it has become increasingly clear that there is really almost no technology moat right now when it comes to the foundation models. Sure, some can be state-of-the-art for a few weeks or even a few months, but after that, everyone catches up. It certainly doesn't seem defensible enough to build a real moat around.
And yet, maybe the one exception to that is the chokehold that Anthropic has on coders. It has for some time now, really since the middle of last year, been the default choice as the coding assistant underlying model. It is, for example, what most people use inside Cursor, which has driven a huge amount of their revenue.
And I don't think it's an accident that the release of 3.7 coincides with a big jump in their revenue as that becomes the default model as well. Now, obviously, Anthropic is going to try to compete in more areas than just software engineering.
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Chapter 3: How is TSMC influencing the US chip industry?
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That's www.kpmg.us slash AI Guide. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today, we are talking nominally about a product demo that has a lot of people talking, both literally and figuratively. The product is called Sesame, and some are even saying that this is the GPT-3 moment for voice AI.
Beyond just talking about Sesame, however, I wanted to use this as a chance to check in on the state of voice agents. There has been an incredible explosion of voice-based platforms.
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Chapter 4: What is Sesame and why is it important for voice AI?
Professor Malik writes, the new AI voice from Sesame really is a powerful illustration of where AI is going. He pointed out that in the demo that he shared, it was all real time from his browser. He writes, excellent use of disfluencies, pauses, even intakes of breath really make this seem like a human, though bits of uncanniness remain for now.
Pliny the Liberator writes, all right, Sesame is by far the most AGI-feeling voice model I've interacted with yet. They absolutely cooked. Chubby writes, I agree with Pliny. This is the first feel the AGI moment for AI voice mode for me. If this would be the new Siri or Alexa, I would treat it as a real human being as it sounds so natural. And we have to remember this is the worst it will ever be.
Entrepreneur Murillo Pereira writes, this is incredible. The voice sounds so natural and the replies are so fast, maybe too fast. It was even able to pronounce my name, which isn't super common. Better conversationalist than many humans. Signal writes, My lord, the Sesame Voice AI is absolutely effing insane. I knew it was artificial. I knew there wasn't a real person on the other end.
And yet I still felt like I was talking to a person. I felt the same social pressure, the same awkwardness when I hesitated, the same discomfort when I misspoke. It wasn't just convincing, it worked on me in a way I didn't expect. I used to think I'd be immune to this. Menlo's Didi Das sums up, this is the GPT-3 moment for voice AI, the movie Her.
Everything we had before was turn by turn, robotic, emotionless with no human tics. This, as Didi points out, is something very different. Now, in terms of some of the details, one of the big innovations that's almost going a little underappreciated is that the voice model is actually extremely small.
Sesame trained the model on approximately a million hours of audio, but managed to bake it down into a 1 billion parameter model with 100 million parameter decoder. They also produced a 3B and an 8B model, which suggests this level of voice assistant will be very cheap and likely able to run on local devices.
Tosh wrote, The cost of speech-to-speech is going to zero once Sesame open-sources the weights. Sesame, which was co-founded by Oculus co-founder Brandon Uribe, has also committed to releasing the model under the Apache 2.0 commercial use license. So what then is their play? Is this a competitor, for example, to Eleven Labs? In point of fact, Sesame is actually going for something different.
Their webpage reads, "...bringing the computer to life. We believe in a future where computers are lifelike. They will see, hear, and collaborate with us the way we're used to. A natural human voice is key to unlocking this future." And so to get there, they write they have two goals.
The first is a personal companion, which they describe as an ever-present brilliant friend and conversationalist, keeping you informed and organized, helping you be a better version of yourself.
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Chapter 5: Are voice agents the future of computing?
He wrote, It's way more human than ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode. I would clearly prefer to talk to such a voice about my problems than a psychologist. I would clearly prefer practicing my English with her than a teacher or Duolingo.
Now, obviously not everyone will feel the same, but I think that the broader point that every increase in the capabilities of voice AI opens up new use cases and opportunities is absolutely true. And that gets us to the broader state of AI voice and specifically AI voice agents. In a recent report by Andreessen Horowitz partner, Olivia Moore, She wrote,
Voice agents also allow businesses to be available to their customers 24-7 to answer questions, schedule appointments, or complete purchases. Customer availability and business availability no longer have to match one-to-one. With voice agents, every business can always be online. And here's where the big pronouncements start to come.
Moore writes, For consumers, we believe voice will be the first and perhaps the primary way people interact with AI. This interaction could take the form of an always available companion or coach or by democratizing services such as language learning that were previously inaccessible. And importantly, she writes, as models improve, voice will become the wedge, not the product.
And indeed, there are so many products. One just needs to look at the B2B voice agents market map that they include to see how companies are using voice for just all sorts of different applications. Of course, there's customer service, the category that you probably think of most when it comes to voice agents.
But then there's also voice agents for sales, voice agents for finance, voice agents for training, logistics, research, recruiting, and then also agents that are verticalized by industry rather than function. Home services, restaurants, auto dealers, real estate, and a heck of a lot of healthcare. On the consumer side, there's a ton happening in ed tech.
There's some interesting experiments on therapy. Plus, there are the general experiments with companions and assistants. The report points out that since 2020, Y Combinator has seen 90 voice agent companies. And as you might imagine, this has only accelerated over the last year.
And interestingly, if you look back, 2024 really was the key building year to enable voice agents in so many different ways. OpenAI debuted GPT-4.0 Voice in May of 2024 and began rollout of Advanced Voice Mode in July of 2024. In September, Notebook LM started to go viral with its audio overviews, and then in October, OpenAI launched the real-time API for developers.
A lot of the early wedges are in doing the same stuff that's available now with humans, just at times or in ways that wouldn't make sense at human prices. So for example, after hours or overflow calls, net new outbound calls and sales, and back office calls that aren't customer facing.
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