Meta has finalized a deal to buy Play AI, a California-based startup that provides users with an artificial intelligence voice cloning tool, Bloomberg reports. The publication reports that “the entire PlayAI team” will join Meta next week, based on an internal memo it has seen. Upon joining the company, the team will be led by Johan Schalkvik, who previously led speech AI research at Google and was also recently hired by another voice AI startup.
The PlayAI tool can clone a user’s voice and generate new human-like voices that can be used on websites, apps, and phones. In its memorandum, Meta reportedly noted that the PlayAI team’s work is a “great fit” with its own work and roadmap across its various products, including Meta AI, its AI characters, and wearables. The company confirmed the acquisition to Bloomberg but did not disclose how much it paid for the deal.
In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg has been personally involved in forming a team for a new AI Superintelligence lab aimed at developing artificial intelligence smarter than humans. In June, Meta completed a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI in exchange for hiring its CEO Alexander Wang to lead the new lab. Scale AI is a startup that labels data that its customers can use to train AI.
Meta reportedly offered $100 million in bonuses to employees of rival companies to get them to jump ship. Reuters listed several employees that the company lured away from competitors, including the co-creators of the OpenAI ChatGPT and GPT-4 models, as well as people who worked on Google Gemini. Bloomberg also reported earlier that Apple lost a top AI executive responsible for the development of advanced AI features to Meta.
