Meta Acquires WaveForms: Building the Future of Voice AI  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hard Fork AI]] - Full Title: Meta Acquires WaveForms: Building the Future of Voice AI - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/fdc3cee0-1aeb-47bc-87c8-722149632370 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Meta's Aggressive AI Talent Strategy** - Meta is aggressively hiring and buying to build a top-tier AI team and avoid falling behind in AI. - Zuckerberg uses huge compensation packages and acquisitions to assemble researchers and technology quickly. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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, including all of the Lama models that I think are super fascinating, I would love for you To go check out my own startup, which is AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link in the description. Basically, you have access to the top 40 AI models that exist. Everything from Google, Anthropic, Cohere, DeepSeek, Llama, OpenAI, Quen, all of that for just 20 bucks a month. So hopefully that saves you on a bunch of subscriptions you can consolidate. And if not, this is an amazing place to try out a whole bunch of models that you might not be subscribed to or might not have access to right now, including a whole bunch of image generators And audio generators like 11 Labs that I personally had an account those just paying 50 bucks a month for before I started doing this. So if you want to check it out, it's AI box.ai. 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 um 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 uh 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 putting together. Basically, Zuckerberg knows if he gets behind on AI, it's not going to bode well for him. And he feels like Lama has slipped a lot. So he's putting together a new superstar, all-star team, basically. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29727bd8-8116-4c99-94eb-e55f0c7450e5)) - **Waveform's Fast Rise And Exit** - Waveform was a young startup that raised $40 million and had a ~$160M pre-money valuation before being acquired by Meta. - The company existed for only about eight months before the acquisition, making the exit strikingly fast. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 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 metas 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 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? ([Time 0:02:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c3e436b-52ba-49ba-8ad8-937dd122f306)) - **Founders' Big-Name Backgrounds** - Waveform's co-founders include former Meta and OpenAI researchers and an ex-Google advertising strategist. - Key team members reportedly joined Meta after the acquisition, reflecting an acqui-hire outcome for founders. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Two of the startup's co-founders, one of them was a former meta and OpenAI researcher, Alexis Kano. They also have a former Google advertising strategist, Coralie Lemitri. And all of them have apparently joined Meta and gone over to the company. Polls that meta was trying to grab he actually co-founded gpt4o'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 uh 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 um it's kind of interesting tech crunch was was doing a bunch of digging on this. ([Time 0:03:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f8eb466e-b69d-4df5-8741-3a449a350a70)) - **Acqui‑Hire Risks For Staff** - Acquisitions sometimes lead to only founders being absorbed while other staff are left behind, creating uncertain outcomes for employees. - Waveform's public site going down and LinkedIn updates hint the team is being folded into Meta now. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer They reached out to Waveform and asked 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 acqui-hired. The co-founders basically go on to the new company. 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 the 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. ([Time 0:04:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc7e2620-d982-4671-8cc5-54e45a2a25eb)) - **Solving The Speech Turing Test** - Waveform's stated mission was to solve the 'speech Turing test' and make AI speech indistinguishable from humans. - That capability is central for natural voice interactions and competitive across multiple AI players. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Basically, their LinkedIn page says that their mission is to solve the, quote, speech Turing test, which tries to measure if a listener can tell between humans or AI-generated speech. Obviously, this is a big challenge as you, 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 when it's Talking to you. Has done a phenomenal job on their natural speech that they've added into ChatGPT and seen a couple other players, Google doing some good work and 11 Labs doing some good work there. ([Time 0:05:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c956a350-28cf-4fbf-b3fe-51fda9e88753)) - **Voice Quality Drives Product Adoption** - Natural-sounding voice is critical for products like Meta's AI app and Ray-Ban smart glasses to be widely adopted. - Robot-like speech reduces usability, so companies prioritize high-quality voice models to improve user experience. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer And Meta needs this for a couple 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 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. You know, I'm looking at a bike. How do I fix the chain? What's broken on this, you know, this engine that I'm looking at and meta will talk to you in your ear. ([Time 0:06:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/89ae8293-45d7-4e5c-9c55-d5addd182970)) - **Emotional Intelligence In Voice AI** - Waveform researched 'emotional general intelligence' to model self-awareness and emotional cues in speech. - That research could deepen conversational AI beyond phrasing into emotional understanding and personalization. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer So they're doing some really interesting research beyond just the technology. And I think that, you know, 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 Meta to go and acquire. I'm not surprised by this. I'm really curious of basically what's going on with the actual deal and what was kind of pounded out as they did that deal. But overall, really excited for the whole team and for the founders. Great work to everybody involved. ([Time 0:07:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c11067c-3392-46bb-9d81-e121d66df525))