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[Topic 3: 11 Labs V3A Release] Chris: Next up, poor 11 Labs. Choosing the absolute craziest news day ever to try to launch a new product. I have been wondering for some time when we were going to get a new 11 Labs model. We’ve been on the same version for so long that you guys have basically run me out of using it for Long Read Sunday. Chris: But we now have 11 V3A, which they call their most expressive text-to-speech model ever. It supports more than 70 languages, multi-speaker dialogue, and also has a new feature called audio tagging. So you can say things like excited sighs, laughing whispers, and people’s first impression of this is really positive. Chris: “Hey Jessica, have you tried the new 11V3? I just got it. The clarity is amazing. I can actually do whispers now. Like this? Oh, fancy. Check this out. I can do full Shakespeare now. To be or not to be, that is the question. Nice, though I’m more excited about the laugh upgrade. Listen to this.” Chris: I’m super excited to use this new idea of kind of tags or metadata to give more information around how the output is supposed to sound. This gives so much more fine-grain control, so I’m super excited to get in there and play around with it. Chris: Give 11 Labs some love. Like I said, they launched into absolute chaos yesterday. Go check out the model. It’s 80% off for June. Again, no sponsorship, no shill. I just like the company. Obviously, I use their tools for things like Long Read Sunday, so I’m excited to check out V3, and I think you should go check it out as well. [Topic 4: Funding and Performance News] Chris: Some funding and performance news. Cursor has apparently crossed the $500 million ARR mark, which is up 2.5X for March. Bloomberg writes that their latest round valued the company at $9.9 billion. Chris: Finally, one more startup that I’m excited to try that has a ton of buzz right now is Higgs Field. The company has gone from zero to $11 million ARR in just eight weeks. And part of why its video generation tools are so popular is that they offer, once again, reminiscent of what we just saw with 11 Labs V3, the ability to control camera angles, to create consistent characters, and to use more cinematic shots, meaning that people are actually using it to go create ads right out of the gate. Chris: Higgs Field represents a new generation of startups that are not just thinking about model performance in general, but are actually building tooling for specific use cases to try to capture that application layer that we keep talking about. So again, if you are doing anything with video generation, go check out Higgs Field. You’re going to be hearing a lot more about them, if for no other reason than they are just rocketing right now when it comes to their business. Chris: For now, that is going to do it for today’s AI Daily Brief headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. [Topic 5: AI Engineer World’s Fair: Overview] Chris: Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are talking about the big trends in the discussion among AI engineers, and here’s why this is a relevant discussion for you, even if you are not yourself an AI engineer. Chris: Basically, everything that comes next when it comes to AI and agents is somewhere right now being conceived of, concocted, collaborated on, or created by an AI engineer, right? This is the cohort who are not just thinking about how to use today’s technology, but about inventing the next technology to come. Chris: When it comes to the more capable agent swarms that you’ll be using in six months, they’re being worked out in the rooms with the AI engineers right now. And so if you are trying to get a preview of the future, understanding where the discourse is with AI engineers is one of your fastest paths to that. Chris: Now, the AI Engineer World’s Fair is part of the AI Engineering Summit family. You might remember that a few months ago, they held their AI Engineering Summit in New York City, and I’ve had Swix from Latent Space, who’s one of the creators of this event, on the show numerous times before. And they have just completed their big annual World’s Fair in San Francisco. Chris: I unfortunately was not able to go this year because I have family stuff this weekend and I have upcoming travel next week. But I was still watching very closely from afar. And I think that this set of content, even more than previous AI Engineer Summits and World’s Fairs, really gives you an incredibly detailed and fairly complete picture of where the agent in AI World is headed. Chris: This was a dense three days, so much so that we even had attendees like Ishan Anand create their own little tools for allowing ChatGPT to go figure out what to go to. You can see, if you’re watching, just how densely packed things were. At any given time, there are about 10 different workshops or talks going on, and one of the best ways to try to understand all the different areas is to look at the more than 20 different tracks they had. Chris: So in brief, they had tracks for AI Architects, AI Product Management, AI in Action, AI in Fortune 500, Agent Reliability, Autonomy and Robotics, Design, Engineering, Evals, General Session, Generative Media, Graphrag, Infrastructure, Keynote, MCP, Reasoning and RL, Retrieval and Search, Software Engineering Agents, Security, Tiny Teams, Vibe Coding, Voice, and Workshops. Chris: Now, obviously, even that is too packed to take on its own, so I broke it into four themes that I see running throughout a bunch of these tracks that I think broadly speak to what’s going on.