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Is Sam Altman’s AGI Masterclass Good? Will the AI Bubble Pop Soon? Are Voice Assistants Ready for Agentic Tasks?

Sam Altman released an AGI Masterclass that recently went viral again on X. CEO Scott Stephenson comments on the "AI Bubble" in the latest episode of his podcast. Cutting-edge research from OLA Electric and Krutrim AI question whether voice assistants are ready for agentic tasks. And much more is revealed in this edition of the AI Minds newsletter!

Author

Jose Nicholas Francisco
December 18, 2025

Welcome (back) to AI Minds, a newsletter about the brainy and sometimes zany world of voice AI, brought to you by the Deepgram editorial team.

In this edition:

  • 📺 This New AI Voice Workspace Is Insanely Powerful

  • 📚 Voice-Language Foundation Models for Real-Time Autonomous Interaction

  • 🔍 VoiceAgentBench: Are Voice Assistants Ready for Agentic Tasks?

  • ⚖️ Text-to-Speech Architecture: Production Tradeoffs for Voice AI

  • 🎙️ Open Source Text to Speech: Production Implementation Guide

  • 🐝 Social Media Buzz: Is Sam Altman’s 40-minute Masterclass Actually Good?

  • 🐦 Why Voice AI is going to “explode” in 2026

  • 📈 NeurIPS 2025 top 50 paper contributors show China and US neck-and-neck

  • 🧠 The Scott Stephenson AI Show, Episode 8: Will the AI Bubble Pop Soon?

Thanks for letting us crash your inbox; let’s party. 🎉

Want a single, unified conversational AI API for building real-time, enterprise-ready, and cost-effective voice AI agents? Check out this link! 

📺  This New AI Voice Workspace Is Insanely Powerful

Video description: “Most AI voice agents today are either slow, inaccurate, don't understand what you're saying, or are just straight up annoying. [...]

In this video, Tech with Tim is going to show you an AI voice agent that has the best speech-to-text and text-to-speech models, though the most accurate, the fastest, and deliver in real time, meaning you don't need to wait for the translation to happen.”

🔍 Can Voice AI Agents Blend Seamlessly into Everyday Life? And are Voice Assistants Ready for Agentic Tasks?

Voila: Voice-Language Foundation Models for Real-Time Autonomous Interaction and Voice Role-Play - This paper introduces Voila, a family of large voice-language foundation models that make a step towards a voice AI agent that blends seamlessly into daily life would interact with humans in an autonomous, real-time, and emotionally expressive manner.

VoiceAgentBench: Are Voice Assistants Ready for Agentic Tasks? - Existing speech benchmarks primarily focus on isolated capabilities and do not systematically evaluate agentic scenarios encompassing multilingual and cultural understanding. To address this, this paper introduces VoiceAgentBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate SpeechLMs in realistic spoken agentic settings.

🔍 Text-to-Speech Articles: Production Tradeoffs and Implementation Guide

Text-to-Speech Architecture: Production Tradeoffs for Voice AI - Explore how text-to-speech architecture impacts latency, concurrency and cost for enterprise-grade voice systems. Learn how to choose the right model and deployment pattern.

Open Source Text to Speech: Production Implementation Guide - A complete guide to evaluating and deploying open source text to speech in production. Learn licensing rules, latency behavior, GPU constraints, cost models, testing requirements, and when managed platforms like Deepgram Aura make more sense.

🐝 Social Media Buzz: Is Sam Altman’s 40-minute Masterclass Actually Good? And more!

🧠 The Scott Stephenson AI Show: Will the AI Bubble Pop Soon?

OpenAI is pulling the "Code Red" lever. The "AI Bubble" discussion continues to heat up. And the latest developments in voice AI technology may just blow your mind.