AI Daily: Meta acquires AI audio startup WaveForms

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

AI VOICE STARTUP: Meta (META) has acquired AI voice startup WaveForms for an undisclosed sum, The Information reports. WaveForms AI is a startup that utilizes AI to replicate emotion in audio.

SUPERCOMPUTER PROJECT: Tesla (TSLA) is disbanding its Dojo team and Peter Bannon, who is heading the group, will leave the company after Elon Musk ordered the effort to be shut down, Ed Ludlow of Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The Dojo team has recently lost around 20 workers to DensityAI and the remaining staffers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, sources told Bloomberg. Tesla plans to increase its reliance on external technology partners, the people added.

AI STAFF: Apple (AAPL) has lost around a dozen of its AI staff, including top researchers, to rivals in recent months, The Financial Times’ Michael Acton reports. Apple has lost AI staff members to Meta (META), OpenAI, xAI, and Cohere, according to the report. OpenAI has poached Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, two Apple foundation models research engineers, while Cohere hired machine learning scientist Liutong Zhou in June, and Ruoming Pang, head of Apple’s foundational models team, departed for Meta last month. Several of the individuals who have left had previously contributed to research papers on AI models that Apple released last year, according to the report.

PARTNERSHIP: Atlassian (TEAM) announced a multi-year partnership with Google (GOOGL) Cloud to accelerate cloud transformation and deliver advanced AI capabilities for customers worldwide. The partnership will bring Atlassian’s leading AI-powered teamwork platform and apps such as Jira, Confluence, and Loom to Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure. It will also fuel deep integrations between Google and Atlassian products, leveraging Gemini models and Vertex AI, to empower customers to build AI agents that boost productivity, increase collaboration, and accelerate innovation. This partnership marks a major leap forward in Atlassian’s multi-cloud strategy, as it brings its widely used apps-Jira, Confluence, and Loom-to Google Cloud, making it easier for organizations to adopt Atlassian’s teamwork solutions. With Atlassian apps available on the Google Cloud Marketplace for the first time as part of the partnership, customers will be able to use funds already set aside for Google Cloud to quickly and simply purchase Atlassian subscriptions.

AI REVOLUTION: DA Davidson notes that while the much-anticipated GPT-5 release by OpenAI prompted a 3%-10% decline across a broad set of the firm’s software coverage, he believes that many software companies are well positioned for the AI revolution. The firm adds that while the debate around LLMs moving into the application layer will continue, it is easier to believe that the software that organizes code and data, and then observes and secures it, will be needed even more as AI ramps up. DA Davidson is positive on Microsoft (MSFT), Snowflake (SNOW), Datadog (DDOG), and Jfrog (FROG).