Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedJohn Collison: belief
14 Apr 2026 Cheeky Pint The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
“I think people have an intuition around big LLMs where there are these very expensive training runs, and yes, they depreciate quickly, but there's so much usage that all of the models trained to date have paid off their training runs and then some.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- John Collison
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 14 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- Cheeky Pint
Transcript context
…As you know, the OpenClaw will look for the most popular tools frequently where it tries to cook up. ElevenLabs is one of the recommended ones. It's the top option for voice. Can you tell me a bit about the business of voice models? I think people have an intuition around big LLMs where there are these very expensive training runs, and yes, they depreciate quickly, but there's so much usage that all of the models trained to date have paid off their training runs and then some. Then there's this ever larger CapEx going into… I mean, a lot of it is inference these days, but also training. People have some intuitions from the LLM world. I'm curious just how I should think about voice, where one, how expensive is training the voice models? Is the expense in the researchers? Is the expense in the training runs? The economics is presumably simple where it's just per-usage. But yeah, just talk us through the business. Definitely cheaper than the LLM and image-video models. Significantly smaller models.…
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