Dec 16, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

🛎️ The Future Is Listening

Plus: NVIDIA‘s New Agent Stack, IBM Ships a Boring Agent

Good Morning, AI Enthusiasts!

AI’s next chapter isn’t being typed; it’s being spoken, listened to, and quietly executed in the background.

VOICE

The Future Is Listening

👀 What’s happening: On No Priors, ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski argued that the next interface shift is not visual but auditory. Voice is becoming the default layer for interacting with AI as models move into real time, multimodal systems. ElevenLabs is already operating at roughly $300M ARR with five million monthly active users, spanning creators and enterprises. The company leads today by pairing research grade audio models with production ready products, but the market itself is still expanding faster than any single player.

🔥 How this hits reality: Voice is moving from novelty to infrastructure. Support centers turn into always on conversational agents. Education shifts toward persistent AI tutors. Commerce adopts voice for discovery and conversion. As demand grows, Big Tech and open source will push hard into the stack, compressing model level advantage. ElevenLabs’ lead depends less on raw voice quality and more on latency, orchestration, voice libraries, compliance, and distribution. This is where competition will get brutal, not polite.

🛎️ Our take: Listening is the next interface war. ElevenLabs is ahead for now, but this market will not reward complacency.

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NEW LAUNCH

NVIDIA Moves In on the Agent Stack

👀 What’s happening: NVIDIA just open sourced Nemotron 3, a model family explicitly engineered for agentic AI rather than general chat. Spanning Nano, Super, and Ultra tiers, it introduces a hybrid latent mixture of experts architecture optimized for multi agent coordination, long horizon reasoning, and low cost inference. Alongside the models, NVIDIA released training datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and evaluation tools, positioning Nemotron as a full open agent foundation rather than a standalone model drop.

🔥 How this hits reality: This shifts the economics of agents fast. Nemotron lets teams run dozens or hundreds of agents without burning frontier model budgets, while keeping reasoning quality acceptable for real workflows. Enterprises get inspectable, sovereign friendly models that fit regulated stacks. Startups gain a default agent backbone that plugs into routers with proprietary models only when needed. Quietly, NVIDIA is becoming the infrastructure layer agents are built on, not just the GPUs they run on.

🛎️ Our take: NVIDIA is not chasing chatbot mindshare. It is methodically swallowing the agent market by owning the cheapest, most practical layer everyone else has to stand on.

NEW LAUNCH

IBM Ships a Boring Agent That Survives Reality

👀 What’s happening: IBM has open-sourced CUGA Agent, a Configurable Generalist Agent built for enterprise workflows, not demo theatrics. Its task completion rates hover around 60 percent on web benchmarks and about 50 percent on API-heavy scenarios, which is mediocre by human standards but near the top for agents operating under real constraints. Instead of chasing raw intelligence, IBM emphasized explicit planning, policy compliance, sandboxed execution, and re-planning when things fail.

🔥 How this hits reality: CUGA quietly resets what “usable” means for agents inside companies. Enterprises care less about brilliance than about not breaking production systems. By making failure observable, contained, and reversible, IBM gives IT teams something they can actually deploy. Teams betting on fully autonomous, black-box agents now look early. The win here is not speed or IQ, but trust. In regulated workflows, that is the real bottleneck.

🛎️ Our take: While others chase smarter agents, IBM chose survivable ones. In enterprise automation, not blowing up the system beats being clever every time.

QUICK HITS

OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery raised a $130 million Series B at a $1.3 billion valuation to advance AI-driven molecular and drug design.
Key open-licensing body Creative Commons cautiously supports AI pay-to-crawl to balance content compensation and public access.
Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 word of the year to describe the surge of low-quality digital content produced at scale by AI.
Amazon has added “Ask this Book” to Kindle, using AI to answer spoiler-free questions from pages already read, with no opt-out for authors.
British Airways warns that as AI agents take over flight decisions, airlines that fail to appeal to machines risk becoming invisible in digital travel markets.

TRENDING

Daily AI Launches

Unloop has launched a visual tool that maps personal behavior patterns and uses AI to help break negative loops.
ManyPI has launched a tool that converts any website into a clean, type-safe API for RAG and data extraction using AI prompts.
Syllaby has released v3.0, an AI video studio that automates the creation of viral, studio-quality content from script to publish.
Google has launched GenTabs, a Gemini 3 experiment that turns open browser tabs into custom, no-code mini-apps.

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