The AI Daily Brief (Formerly The AI Breakdown): Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
Are Voice Agents the Next Big Computing Platform?
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
Full Episode
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.
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.
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