The Daily AI Briefing - 24/04/2025

Welcome to The Daily AI Briefing, here are today's headlines! Today, we're covering some groundbreaking developments in the AI landscape. Two Korean undergrads have created a revolutionary open-source speech model. The Washington Post has joined OpenAI's growing media alliance. Anthropic's CISO predicts AI employees will soon be working on corporate networks. Plus, we'll look at trending AI tools and other significant industry updates. Let's dive into today's AI news. First up, a remarkable achievement from two undergraduate students in Korea. Nari Labs has released Dia, an open-source text-to-speech model that reportedly outperforms leading commercial offerings like ElevenLabs and Sesame. What makes this story extraordinary is that Dia was developed by two undergrads with zero funding. The 1.6 billion parameter model supports advanced features including emotional tones, multiple speaker tags, and nonverbal cues like laughter and coughing. Using Google's TPU Research Cloud for computing power, the team has created a model that excels in timing, expressiveness, and handling nonverbal scripts. Nari Labs founder Toby Kim plans to develop a consumer app focused on social content creation based on this technology. This breakthrough exemplifies Sam Altman's philosophy that "you can just do things" – proving that even inexperienced undergraduates can develop technology rivaling industry leaders with sufficient determination and ingenuity. In media partnership news, The Washington Post has officially joined OpenAI's alliance, enabling ChatGPT to include summaries and links from its reporting directly in answers. This deal means ChatGPT users will now see quotes, summaries, and direct links to relevant Washington Post articles when asking questions. The Jeff Bezos-owned publication joins over 20 major news publishers already partnering with OpenAI. This collaboration is particularly noteworthy as it occurs amid ongoing legal battles between OpenAI and other publishers like The New York Times over training data and copyright concerns. The Washington Post has been actively exploring AI applications, launching tools like Ask The Post AI and Climate Answers over the past year. This partnership represents another major news outlet choosing collaboration over litigation, betting that visibility through ChatGPT will be crucial for reaching global audiences in the AI era. Looking ahead, Anthropic's Chief Information Security Officer, Jason Clinton, has made a bold prediction: AI-powered virtual employees will be operating on corporate networks within the next year. These AI employees would have their own corporate accounts, passwords, and "memories" – a significant advancement from current task-specific AI assistants. Clinton highlighted several security challenges this will introduce, including managing AI account privileges, monitoring access, and determining responsibility for autonomous actions. He identified virtual employees as the next "AI innovation hotbed," with corresponding security measures developing alongside it. Anthropic is focusing on securing its own AI models against attacks while monitoring potential areas of misuse. This prediction suggests we're approaching a fundamental shift in how work is organized, requiring entirely new security frameworks for this emerging category of digital workers. In tool developments, several new AI applications are gaining traction. Agent-to-Agent Transfers now enable seamless handoffs between different AI systems. Descript has launched AI Co-Editor, an agentic video editing assistant. Genspark AI Slides offers quick generation of presentation materials. Meta has introduced Edits, a new video creation app with AI features. These tools demonstrate the growing ecosystem of specialized AI applications designed to augment creative and professional workflows. Additional developments worth noting include OpenAI's product head expressing interest in acquiring Google Chrome during the tech giant