Meta is reportedly in the talks to acquire voice-cloning startup Play AI. According to Bloomberg, the tech giant plans to buy the startup’s tech, as well as bring on board some of its staff.
Play AI lets anyone clone different kinds of voices that they can use for AI-powered use cases such as customer service, per its website. The startup has raised $23.5 million in total, and its investors include 500 Startups, Kindred Ventures, Race Capital, 500 Global and Soma Capital, according to Crunchbase. This deal is still under discussion, and financial terms have not yet been revealed.
Meta currently allows creators on its social media platforms to build their own chatbots. It has also added video-editing capabilities to Meta AI. Acquiring a voice startup would let the company bake in audio features into its creative suite.
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Of late, Meta has been going all-in on AI-related acquisitions and recruitments. The company had recruited Daniel Gross, the CEO of OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), following a failed attempt to acquire the same company. Gross also runs a venture capital firm with GitHub CEO Nat Friedman — who’s also been hired by Meta — called NFDG.
Gross’ recruitment comes shortly after the recruitment of Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. According to a Scale AI spokesperson, Meta is investing $14.3 billion as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup but will not have any voting power. The recruitment of Gross and Wang are believed to be part of an effort to in the race to develop powerful large language models and to reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). OpenAI has also recently acquired Apple designer John Ive’s startup io.
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Meta’s hiring tactics of late has also included attempts to poach employees from rivals like OpenAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed reports that the tech giant had offered employees packages upwards of $100 million. OpenAI also managed to pull in three senior researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich team. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai are the recently added members to the Meta’s “superintelligence” team, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company planned to spend about $68 billion in capital expenditures this year, up from $39.2 billion 2024. The investment is focused on developing AI infrastructure such as data centers with advanced processors from Nvidia. These data centers power the training and operation of Meta’s Llama AI models.