The entire Play AI team will join Meta next week and work under Johan Schalkwyk, a former leader of voice AI research at Google, who was recently recruited by Meta from another voice AI startup.
Play AI develops technology that can copy user voices and create new voices as real, which can be integrated into websites, applications or phones. Meta assessed Play AI's technology as very suitable for the products the company is developing, including Meta AI, AI Characters and wearables. Although Meta confirmed the deal to the press, Meta did not disclose the contract value.
Over the past few months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has directly led the construction of a Super Intelligence AI lab. In June, Meta poured $14.3 billion into Scale AI in exchange for recruiting the company's CEO, Alexandr Wang - who is now taking on the role of new lab leader. Scale AI is a company specializing in labeling training data for AI models.
Meta is also said to be spending big to attract talent, with a reward of up to 100 million USD for employees from competitors. The company has attracted many leading experts, including co-authors of OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4 models, as well as engineers who have worked in the Google Gemini project.
