AI Leadership Weekly

Top Stories

Berkeley AI can turn thoughts into speech
Converting thoughts to speech has previously been possible, but the new neuroprosthesus from UC Berkeley helps restore much more natural speech to injured patients.

The first major breakthrough is that this system operates on only a 1-second delay compared to older systems, making conversations more natural and free-flowing for all participants. Further, the model can be trained on the user's voice from recordings taken prior to the injury or ailment that has taken their speech, meaning that the words will also sound like them.

This new approach also isn't tied to one brain-sensing system, and was also able to handle words not found in its training data, making it incredibly versatile.

Runway Research releases Runway Gen-4 video model
Runway Research has released their latest AI video generator, with a focus on user control and scene continuity.

As impressive as other video generation models have been, there are constant issues with characters and locations and objects shifting styles or morphing into other objects, as well as objects popping into and out of existence. This new model claims to have overcome those issues, and claims to be able to generate consistent characters, locations, and more, across multiple scenes.

If reliable, this will mark the beginning of AI video being viable for projects of even modest length.

AI therapist sees positive results
A clinical trial of a Dartmouth-developed "therapy" chatbot named Therabot has produced positive mental health results for its participants, according to a study published in NEJM AI.

The trial of Therabot consisted of 106 participants, each suffering from either major depressive disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, or an eating disorder. The participants reported trusting and being able to communicate with their AI therapist on a level similar to a real therapist.

The reported improvements were significant, with the depressed participants reporting an average 51% reduction in their symptoms, and a 31% reduction for those with anxiety. Those suffering from an eating disorder reported a 16% reduction, which was higher than the study's control group.

In Brief

• Anthropic updates its AI security safeguards

• Gemini 2.5 Pro now available to free users

• New free AI agent intensifies China AI race

Market Trends

OpenAI closes $40 billion funding round
OpenAI has closed its latest funding round, which raised $40 billion. This is the largest funding round ever in tech history, and now values the company at $300 billion.

$30 billion comes from Japanese company SoftBank, who are partnering with OpenAI on the Stargate project. The remaining $10 billion came from a syndicate of other investors, including Microsoft.

Reportedly, the investment will start with $10B, with the remainder coming by the end of 2025, part of which will be used for OpenAI's contribution to the Stargate project. However, it's also reported that the full funding amount is contingent on OpenAI transitioning to being a for-profit company

AI drug lab raises $600m
Isomorphic Labs, a Google-backed company, has raised $600m in funding.

Thrive Capital lead this round, which included Google Ventures and Alphabet itself. The company, founded in 2021, is focused on using AI tech to research and produce therapeutic drugs, and is a co-developer of AlphaFold 3 along with Google DeepMind.

OpenAI is becoming more open
Sam Altman announced that OpenAI will soon be releasing a new, open-weight language and reasoning model, and is soliciting feedback from the community.

This will be their first open-weight model since GPT-2, and they are currently putting it through its paces and safety checks before releasing it to the world.

The first public consultations will begin in San Francisco in only a few weeks, with select developers able to play with the WIP models in the coming months.

Tools and Resources

ElevenLabs RAG
Equip your RAG system with an ElevenLabs voice

Hero UI
Build user interfaces from prompts and screen shots.

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