Two undergrads build elite speech AI

PLUS: Anthropic CISO says AI employees coming in the next year

Author

Rowan Cheung
April 23, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Two Korean undergrads with little AI experience took Sam Altman’s “you can just build things” quote to heart — building an open-source speech model that outperforms industry leaders — with zero funding.

With AI tools and resources becoming more accessible globally, the era of solo builders competing with billion-dollar labs has officially arrived.

P.S. — Our next workshop is today at 1 pm, where you’ll learn how to turn raw ideas into polished, on-brand presentations with Gamma. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Two undergrads unveil SOTA speech AI

  • The Washington Post joins OpenAI's alliance

  • Automate your sales with personalized emails

  • Anthropic CISO: AI employees are coming

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NARI LABS

Image source: Nari Labs

The Rundown: Korean startup Nari Labs released Dia, an open-source text-to-speech model that claims to exceed the capabilities of leading commercial offerings like ElevenLabs and Sesame — developed by two undergraduate techies with zero funding.

The details:

  • The 1.6B parameter model supports advanced features like emotional tones, multiple speaker tags, and nonverbal cues like laughter, coughing, and screams.

  • The work was inspired by Google’s NotebookLM, with Nari also using Google’s TPU Research Cloud program for compute access.

  • Side‑by‑side tests show Dia outshining ElevenLabs Studio and Sesame CSM‑1B in timing, expressiveness, and handling nonverbal scripts.

  • Nari Labs founder Toby Kim said the startup plans to develop a consumer app focused on social content creation and remixing based on the model.

Why it matters: Dia is a living testament to Sam Altman’s ‘you can just do things’ tweet, with two inexperienced undergrads training an open-source model that competes with the top voice tech on the market. There’s never been a better time to try and build something, with AI unlocking new access to learning like never before.

TOGETHER WITH GAMMA

The Rundown: For consultants, educators, marketers, and sales pros drowning in content creation, Gamma's all-in-one platform is the lifeline you need — helping you create beautiful presentations, websites, and social media content with minimal effort.

Gamma allows you to:

  • Generate content from simple text prompts or import and improve existing work

  • Edit images with a single click — change subjects, styles, or remove backgrounds

  • Easily export content to Google Slides/PDFs/PowerPoint

  • Experience an upgraded AI and UI for a powerful content creation experience

Click here to experience Gamma and join 50M other users creating 700k presentations a day.

OPENAI

Image source: Washington Post

The Rundown: The Washington Post just announced a new partnership with OpenAI, allowing the AI leader to bring summaries and links from its reporting directly into ChatGPT answers.

The details:

  • ChatGPT will now feature summaries, quotes, and direct links to relevant Washington Post articles in its responses to user questions.

  • The deal adds the Jeff Bezos-owned Post to OpenAI's expanding roster of media partners, with over 20 major news publishers.

  • It also comes amid ongoing legal battles between OpenAI and other major publishers, including the NYT, over training data and copyright issues.

  • The Washington Post has been actively experimenting with AI, launching tools like Ask The Post AI and Climate Answers over the past year.

Why it matters: Another major news outlet is choosing partnership over litigation, with a bet that visibility via ChatGPT will be key to reaching audiences worldwide. OpenAI also gains more trustworthy content for its AI, and a giant like WaPo joining on further isolates publishers like the NYT, who are fighting back in court.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use n8n to turn your static contact lists into dynamic sales outreach machines by automatically sending personalized emails to prospects based on their company, role, and interests.

Step-by-step:

  1. Create a new n8n workflow and set up a Google Sheets trigger that monitors when new leads are added to your spreadsheet.

  2. Add an AI Agent node and connect it to a language model to process your contact information.

  3. Configure a Gmail node to create drafts of personalized emails instead of sending them directly.

  4. Write detailed instructions in the AI Agent's system message telling it exactly how to craft sales emails.

Pro tip: Fine-tune your AI's writing style by testing different system message instructions. We did an extensive workshop showing how to create your own AI Agent to automate tasks and run local AI models with n8n here.

PRESENTED BY AXOLOTL

The Rundown: Axolotl v0.8.0 is an open‑source toolkit built by devs, for devs — giving you full transparency and the freedom to customize large language models through simple configuration.

With Axolotl, you can:

  • Post‑train LLaMA, Gemma, Mistral, and other leading models from one workflow

  • Scale effortlessly — from a single local GPU to multi‑node cloud clusters

  • Get started fast thanks to an easy, plug‑and‑play setup

Dive into Axolotl v0.8.0 to start post‑training today.

ANTHROPIC

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic's Chief Information Security Officer, Jason Clinton, just predicted that AI-powered virtual employees will begin operating on corporate networks within the next year, bringing major new challenges in security management.

The details:

  • These AI employees would have their own corporate accounts, passwords, and "memories," a significant step up from current task-specific AI agents.

  • Clinton said security challenges will include managing AI account privileges, monitoring access, and determining responsibility for autonomous actions.

  • He sees virtual employees as the next “AI innovation hotbed,” with virtual employee security also emerging as an area of focus alongside it.

  • Anthropic said it's focused on securing its own AI models against attacks and watching out for potential areas of misuse.

Why it matters: Work is about to change completely in the AI age, and so will the security measures needed for this brand-new type of employee. The question is if cybersecurity practices will update fast enough to keep up — or if it will take a major breach or exploit as a wake-up call for new threats that autonomous AI workers present.

QUICK HITS

  • 🔐 Runway - Member of Technical Staff

  • 🎧 Soundhound AI - Customer Success Representative

  • 📈 Abridge - Director, GTM Strategy + Pricing

  • 🗣️ Captions - Community Manager

OpenAI’s head of product, Nick Turley, testified in Google’s antitrust trial that the AI leader would be interested in buying its Google Chrome browser if a sale were forced.

Apple removed "available now" claims from its Apple Intelligence marketing page following the National Advertising Division's concerns about misleading availability.

Character AI launched AvatarFX, an AI platform that allows users to create long-form, coherent talking avatars from a single reference photo and voice selection.

IBM and the European Space Agency released TerraMind, an open-source AI system that uses nine data modalities and satellites for real-time climate monitoring.

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez joined the board of electric automaker Rivian, aiming to integrate AI tech more broadly into the company’s products and manufacturing.

Motorola debuted SVX, a new AI-powered device that combines a body camera, speakers, and an AI assistant to reduce emergency response times.

COMMUNITY

Join our next workshop today at 1 PM EST with Mel, Creative Director at Gamma. By the end of the workshop, you’ll learn how to turn raw ideas into polished, on-brand presentations using Gamma’s powerful AI storytelling tools — no design skills needed.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team

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