Kilian Butler
August 19, 2025
AI Doesn’t Live in Text Alone
AI is moving beyond text, toward agents that can listen, speak, and interact naturally with the world. Voice AI requires far more than word; it demands the nuanced tones, emotions, and dynamics of human speech. But unlike text, there’s no vast public library of labeled audio to train on. Scale is building that foundation, delivering high-quality, diverse, and emotionally rich speech data to power every stage of model development. From real-time conversation to multimodal perception, these datasets are unlocking the next era of human-computer interaction. The future is listening.
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July 16, 2025
Do AI Tools Slow Down Developers? The Answer Isn't Simple.
A recent viral study from METR challenged a core assumption of the AI era: that AI tools make developers more productive. It found that expert developers were actually 19% slower when using them, even though they felt 20% faster. In this post, we break down the likely reasons for this surprising slowdown and argue the study's focus on expert speed leads us to consider a more profound story: AI's true value may be in empowering a new generation of vibe coders and managers to build things that otherwise would never have existed. Ultimately, the question isn't just whether AI makes us faster. It's about how we measure value in an era where enjoyment, context, and empowerment are becoming just as important as the clock.
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