Startup receives R$264 million to “excite” AI

Last Monday (9), Andreessen Horowitz – also known as a16z – announced the million-dollar investment in the startup WaveForms AI, a company led by CEO Alexis Conneau, former researcher and co-creator of OpenAI's GPT4-o voice mode feature.

a16z, a supporter of the project, which already has US$44 billion (R$264 billion) in capital invested in various funds, is betting on WaveForms AI technology, as an immersive human experience when using the tool. The investment of US$40 million (R$240 million) will boost the development of the new fully humanized audio language model.

The project

a16z's conceptual vision is always reflected in the actions of the projects it supports. The ideal of boldness for building the future using technology points the direction in each connection, always linked to progress. “We couldn't imagine a better team to take on this challenge. The company is led by CEO Alexis Conneau, one of the world's leading audio and text LLM researchers and co-creator of GPT4 – OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode”declared the company.

_{Alexis Conneau, CEO and Co-Founder of WaveForms AI (Photo: reproduction/WaveForms AI)}

According to the giant investor, the voice models, active in the market, follow a protocol with several steps: transcription of the user's speech, generation of a text response, and then executing the speech as a response from the text. Different from the standard, until now exposed by artificial intelligence companies, the model designed by the Conneau startup, processes the audio instantly, bringing dialogues to life, especially with regard to the user's emotional nuances, making the conversation something natural, evolving considerably in the sentimental aspect, between: machine and human being.

“To that end, we couldn't be more excited to announce our investment in WaveForms AI. The company is training an end-to-end audio language model with the goal of solving the Speech Turing Test — creating an AI that appears indistinguishable to speak to a human”, said the company in an official note.

_{Scene from the film “Her”, where Theodore Twombly (played by actor Joaquim Phoenix) talks to AI Samantha (Photo: reproduction/Netflix)}

The advance

Being something essential for human relationships, emotions guide interpersonal relationships, since when individuals come into contact for the first time in everyday life. And, no longer, like a product imported from Hollywood scenes or episodes of “The Jetsons”, interactivity with machines, at its new responsive level, promises the most unusual relational scenario, where AI can also have emotional intelligence.

WaveForms AI is taking a very important step in this technological race. From Silicon Valley to the world, visionary Alexis Conneau and his team, with the support and powerful investment of Andreesen Horowitz, are with “the knife and the cheese in the hands” in this relationship that has everything right, as in a good and humanized dialogue.

Featured photo: Conceptual vision of the relationship between humans and AI (Reproduction/Freepik)