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Hello reader,
The AI bubble hasn’t burst – at least not yet.
If this week’s stories make one thing clear, it’s that there is a real fight for AI inside labs, model architectures, and IPO pipelines.
Take ElevenLabs. The voice AI startup’s CEO recently told us that his company just crossed US$300 million in annual recurring revenue barely a few years after launch, a pace most SaaS companies would kill for.
The company isn’t stopping at audio. Its push to combine voice and video generation hints at fully AI-made content that no longer needs stitching across different tools.
ElevenLabs’ valuation rose to US$6.6 billion at breakneck speed, proving that there’s huge demand for its services. Nvidia’s backing could further accelerate its expansion, giving it better GPU access, more favorable pricing, and the infrastructure support needed to scale.
Image credit: Arsal Ysfin
China is gearing up for its own proving ground. Two of its most valuable model developers, Zhipu AI and MiniMax, are preparing to go public. They are unprofitable and burning capital, but they’re racing to go public anyway.
Why? Because the real contest isn’t who builds the biggest model, it’s who convinces the public markets that it can monetize one.
We also profiled a 22-year-old NUS student who is asking whether the transformer architecture itself needs a reboot. That line of thinking led him to becoming an AI research scientist in a Silicon Valley VC firm.
Meanwhile, OpenAI can’t afford stepping out of the spotlight. It projects a leap from 35 million to 220 million paying ChatGPT subscribers by 2030.
Different fronts, one takeaway: the AI bubble isn’t here just yet.
Samreen Ahmad, journalist
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