It’s time to bring emotional intelligence to AI.
Many companies are focused on building the smartest possible models, which is a crucial goal. There’s no shortage of use cases — AI for law, finance, or medicine, for example – that require the most intelligent models with the best reasoning skills.
But for other use cases, EQ is equally (if not more) important than IQ. To create the most immersive and human-like experiences, we need AI that truly feels like talking to a person. This includes giving AI a voice.
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 AI that feels indistinguishable from talking to a human.
This is different from today’s existing voice models, which typically require multiple steps: transcribing a user’s speech, generating a text response, and then running it through a text-to-speech model to respond. WaveForms’ new model processes audio natively, enabling more seamless and real-time interactions that fully capture the emotional nuance of a user’s voice and respond in kind.
We couldn’t imagine a better team to tackle 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 OpenAI’s GPT4-o Advanced Voice Mode. Cofounder Coralie Lemaitre, a distinguished business strategy leader from Google, will drive product strategy and operations to bring the company’s vision to life.
WaveForms AI is hiring in San Francisco. If you’re excited about building emotional general intelligence (EGI), check out their website for open roles.
- Investing in Deeptune Marco Mascorro and Martin Casado
- Investing in Shizuku AI Justine Moore, Marco Mascorro, and Martin Casado
- The 2045 Superintelligence Timeline: Epoch AI’s Data-Driven Forecast Marco Mascorro, David Owen, Yafah Edelman, and Erik Torenberg
- Building a16z’s Personal AI Workstation with four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell Max-Q GPUs Marco Mascorro
- Google DeepMind Lead Researchers on Genie 3 & the Future of World-Building Anjney Midha, Marco Mascorro, Justine Moore, Erik Torenberg, Jack Parker-Holder, and Shlomi Fruchter
- Investing in TypeSafe AI Jennifer Li, Sarah Wang, Martin Casado, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz
- Investing in doxxnet Joel de la Garza and Martin Casado
- AI Can Write Code. Why Isn’t Software Better? Diogo Almeida, Ben Horowitz, and Martin Casado
- Aaron Levie, Steven Sinofsky & Martin Casado: How Do You Secure a World of AI Agents? Aaron Levie, Martin Casado, Steven Sinofsky, and Erik Torenberg
- Databricks CEO on AI Pacing, Cyber Risk, and the Enterprise Ali Ghodsi, Martin Casado, and Sarah Wang