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▶ 31:15 · $WHISPER · Whisper raises $280M at $2B valuation to build Jarvis-like voice assistant
episode briefing
The Information

OpenAI Slows Model Development After AI Hack, Anthropic Founders Grab Voting Power Ahead of IPO

2026-08-20 · 3 company · 13 thematic
sentiment
1 bull0 bear2 neu
speakers
ta kotari

Leads Whisper, a voice AI startup that raised $280M at $2B valuation; building product-first voice interaction models with privacy-opt-in data strategy targeting mainstream adoption.

rocket true

Reporter covering AI and robotics for The Information, author of a column on compute access challenges for AI startups training their own models.

corey weinberg

Corey Weinberg is a senior reporter at The Information who authored a profile of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and covers AI company business models.

quote
“we're calling the first model Kanto and it is the first in a series of models that we'll be developing that go and solve a number of really hard problems in voice that have played and essentially been an obstacle to having voice be the def…”
—ta kotari
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$WHISPERbullish· highta kotari
Whisper raises $280M at $2B valuation to build Jarvis-like voice assistant
Whisper differentiates by building proprietary speech models (Kanto) trained on 800k hours of opt-in user data — 1.5x OpenAI's Whisper v3 dataset — with privacy-first opt-in archi…