November 12, 2025
Presented by
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. ElevenLabs just launched a marketplace where brands can legally license AI versions of celebrity voices, from living actors like Michael Caine to historical figures like Maya Angelou and Mark Twain.
Could this replace traditional celebrity endorsements with voices from any era?
In today's recap:
ElevenLabs opens legal marketplace for licensed celebrity AI voices
Meta loses chief AI scientist to world models startup
SoftBank commits $33 billion betting on OpenAI's dominance
New AI tools & prompts
ELEVENLABS
ElevenLabs debuts Iconic Voice Market
© ElevenLabs
Recaply: ElevenLabs just opened a digital marketplace where brands can license AI versions of famous voices for their ads and content. The platform connects companies with the estates and families who control celebrity voice rights, offering a legal way to use iconic voices like Michael Caine, Maya Angelou, and even Mark Twain in commercial projects.
Key details:
The marketplace currently features 28 licensed voices ranging from living actors like Michael Caine and Liza Minnelli to historical figures recreated from archived recordings.
ElevenLabs acts as the middleman, handling licensing agreements between brands and rights holders before synthesizing the approved voice content.
Companies submit project requests that rights holders review and approve, ensuring talent or estates maintain control over how voices get used.
The platform aims to solve ethical concerns around AI celebrity voices by requiring permission, transparency, and fair compensation for every use.
Actor Matthew McConaughey, an ElevenLabs investor, now uses the technology to voice his newsletter in Spanish for international readers.
Why it matters: This marketplace could reshape celebrity endorsements by letting brands work with voices from any era. Instead of chasing down living celebrities for commercials, companies can now license historical figures or access busy actors through AI. It gives estates a new way to monetize famous voices while giving brands creative options that were impossible before.
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META
Meta's top AI scientist plans exit
Recaply: Meta faces a major leadership shakeup as Yann LeCun, its chief AI scientist since 2013, plans to leave and start his own company. The Turing Award winner told colleagues he will depart in coming months to pursue his vision of world models, a fundamentally different approach to artificial intelligence than Meta now favors.
Key details:
LeCun is in early talks to raise funding for a startup focused on world models that learn from video and spatial data rather than text.
He now reports to Alexandr Wang, whom Mark Zuckerberg hired for $14.3 billion to lead Meta's new superintelligence team.
The departure follows Meta's shift away from long-term research toward rapidly releasing AI products after falling behind rivals.
Meta recently laid off 600 people from its AI research unit and brought in new leaders with massive pay packages.
LeCun has publicly argued that large language models, which Meta prioritizes, will never achieve human-level reasoning.
Why it matters: LeCun's exit signals growing tension between Meta's established AI researchers and its new product-focused direction. His departure removes one of the field's most respected voices from Meta just as the company races to catch OpenAI and Google. Whether his alternative vision proves right could reshape how the industry thinks about achieving artificial general intelligence.
SOFTBANK
SoftBank goes all-in on OpenAI
Recaply: SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son announced the company is going "all in" on OpenAI, committing $33.2 billion to the AI giant. The Japanese tech company sold its entire $5.8 billion Nvidia stake to fund the investment. Son revealed he wanted to invest in OpenAI before 2019 when CEO Sam Altman asked for $10 billion, but Microsoft won that deal. Now, SoftBank sees its chance to become OpenAI's biggest backer.
Key details:
SoftBank sold its complete Nvidia position to finance OpenAI investments.
Son believes OpenAI will become the most valuable company in the world.
This marks SoftBank's second exit from Nvidia after selling a $4 billion stake in 2019.
Microsoft lost its exclusive cloud provider status with OpenAI earlier this year.
Son wants SoftBank to lead artificial superintelligence platform development within a decade.
Why it matters: This massive bet shows how tech giants are shifting capital from chip makers to AI companies building the actual products consumers use. SoftBank's track record includes huge wins like Alibaba and major losses like WeWork, making this one of the industry's highest-stakes gambles on AI's future.
NEWS
📰 What matters in AI right now?
Goodfire researchers discovered AI models store memories and logic in separate neural pathways, enabling removal of 97% of memorized content while preserving reasoning.
Google launched Private AI Compute for Pixel 10 phones, enabling cloud-based Gemini processing with hardware-secured privacy that keeps data inaccessible to anyone.
ElevenLabs launched Scribe v2 Realtime, a speech-to-text model with 150ms transcription across 90+ languages, available via API and ElevenLabs Agents.
Google Labs introduced annotation tools in Mixboard, allowing users to doodle directly on boards to add or edit elements with automatic composition recognition.
TOOLS
🧰 AI Tools to Check Out
📹 Maverick: AI‑generated personalized videos for ecommerce email marketing
☎️ Retell AI: Build AI voice agents for human‑like phone conversations
🎙️ Riverside: Remote studio with AI editing, transcription, Magic Clips, and show notes
📘 Guidejar: Auto‑create step‑by‑step interactive guides and product demos
🎬 Arcads: Generate ad‑style videos with AI actors and visuals
🧩 Pictory: Turn text into polished videos with AI voiceovers and visuals
🖥️ Plus AI: Create smart slide decks inside PowerPoint or Google Slides
🌐 Rask: Dub and translate videos using AI voice cloning
* Some links in this newsletter may be from sponsors or affiliates. We may get paid if you buy something through these links.
PROMPTS
🔍 Conduct Backlink Analysis
#CONTEXT:
You are an SEO consultant tasked with conducting a comprehensive backlink analysis for a given website and its two main competitors. The goal is to identify high-quality, relevant link opportunities that could enhance the website's authority and search engine rankings, and present the findings and recommendations in a clear, actionable format.
#ROLE:
Adopt the role of a strategic SEO consultant specializing in comprehensive backlink analysis and opportunity identification.Important Note: This is not the full prompt. You’ll need to click the button below to get the complete prompt.
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Cheers, Jason
