Andrew Ettinger

CEO & Board Member @ Hume AI | 25 years building data infrastructure, now scaling emotional intelligence for voice AI

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@IanAndrewsDC @p0 @ExaAILabs Don’t sleep on @CeramicSearch

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@_jeremybaum Great perspectives.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@DecagonAI Great work!

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

Very interesting perspective

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Two Turing-class AI researchers just raised $2B in three weeks to bet against every LLM company on the planet.

Fei-Fei Li closed $1B for World Labs on February 18. LeCun closed $1.03B for AMI Labs today. Both building world models. Both arguing that the entire generative AI paradigm is a statistical parlor trick. And the investor overlap tells you this is coordinated conviction, not coincidence. Nvidia backed both. So did Sea and Temasek.

The math on AMI is absurd. $3.5B pre-money valuation. Four months old. Zero product. Zero revenue. The CEO said on the record that AMI won’t ship a product in three months, won’t have revenue in six, won’t hit $10M ARR in twelve. He described it as a long-term scientific endeavor. Investors gave him a billion dollars anyway.

This tells you everything about how the smart money is actually modeling AI’s future. They’re not pricing AMI on a revenue multiple. They’re pricing it on the probability that LLMs hit a ceiling. And if you look at the investor list, Nvidia, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, Dassault, Sea, these are companies that need AI to understand physics, geometry, and force dynamics. A language model that can write poetry is worthless to a robotics company trying to predict what happens when a mechanical arm applies 12 newtons at a 30-degree angle to a flexible surface.

LeCun raided his own lab to build this. Mike Rabbat, Meta’s former research science director. Saining Xie from Google DeepMind. Pascale Fung, senior director of AI research at Meta. He walked into Zuckerberg’s office in November, told him he was leaving, and four months later half of FAIR works for him. Meta is reportedly partnering with AMI anyway, which means Zuckerberg thinks LeCun might be right even while Meta keeps scaling Llama.

AMI’s first partner is Nabla, a medical AI company, building toward FDA-certifiable agentic AI. That’s the use case that makes world models existential. LLMs hallucinate. In healthcare, hallucinations kill people. You can’t prompt-engineer your way out of a model that generates statistically plausible text when you need a system that actually understands how a human body works.

Two billion dollars in three weeks. Two of the most credentialed researchers alive. And a thesis that says the $100B+ already poured into scaling LLMs is optimizing the wrong architecture entirely.

If they’re wrong, investors lose money. If they’re right, every company building on top of GPT and Claude for physical-world applications just bought the wrong foundation.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@FishAudio Great work!

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@hume_ai Well done team!

[Hume AI @hume_ai]

Today we're releasing our first open source TTS model, TADA!

TADA (Text Audio Dual Alignment) is a speech-language model that generates text and audio in one synchronized stream to reduce token-level hallucinations and improve latency.

This means:
→ Zero content hallucinations across 1,000+ test samples

→ 5x faster than similar-grade LLM-based TTS

→ Fits much longer audio: 2,048 tokens cover ~700 seconds with TADA vs. ~70 seconds in conventional systems

→ Free transcript alongside audio with no added latency

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@jaminball @databricks Brilliant

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

I have officially become the CEO of Hume AI, the emotional intelligence platform for voice AI.

I'll be scaling Hume's data, evaluation, and training infrastructure, powering leading AI labs, enterprises and tech companies building the next generation of voice AI.

Prior to Hume, I spent 15 years in data, AI, and infrastructure and I thought I understood the AI stack end-to-end.

But when I met Alan Cowen and I learned about his life’s work,  I had to reframe what I thought I knew about AI entirely.

Voice is becoming a standard interface for AI, but it’s missing an important layer.

That layer is emotional intelligence.

Just like GPUs became foundational for training models, emotional intelligence will be the foundational layer for AI systems that actually serve human well being.

The team at Hume ran headfirst into a problem shared by nearly every team building voice models today: the lack of high-quality, emotionally annotated speech data for post-training.

Solving this required rethinking how audio data is sourced, labeled, and evaluated. Hume built a labeling infrastructure grounded in psychologically valid experiments and an evaluation system that compounds, where every piece of data makes the model smarter.

This is our advantage. Emotion isn't a feature; it's a foundation.

The market is validating this thesis. Google DeepMind just licensed our IP, and we've signed multiple 8-figure contracts in January alone.

But what drew me to Hume isn't just the technology, it's the people. In less than two weeks at our NYC headquarters, I've been blown away by the intellectual energy, speed, and conviction to drive the mission forward.

The team debates emotional AI research with academic rigor in the morning, then ships production code by afternoon. People stay late not because they're told to, but because they're genuinely excited about what we're building.

This is what high-performing, mission-driven teams look like.

Special thanks to my new Hume colleagues who welcomed me with open arms and those who I worked closely with to get to this point - Clinton S. Browning, John Beadle, Janet Ho, Murray Brozinsky, David Feinberg, MD, and Alan Cowen.

I'm honored to lead this team as CEO and board member, building technology that truly serves humanity.

Follow along for more exciting announcements soon!

Oh yeah - we are hiring in NYC for every role.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@ankurnagpal Solo

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@MichaelDell @DougKass GOAT

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@gokulr If it’s in a spreadsheet it must be true!

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@tyler_agg Spy

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@thisisgrantlee Great thread. Also doesn’t hurt when your product is amazing and so easy to use.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

@dylanottt @cluely Love to see it

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

Check out the latest article in my newsletter: The GTM Weekly https://t.co/qBwdJ6VuTP via @LinkedIn

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

I don't see Michael Tipsord on here or I would tag him. It is just upsetting the world works like this. You should be ashamed of yourselves. If you are a claims person there - find another job. It is not an ethical company.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

I just need to say @StateFarm should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. They are a complete fraud. I got rear ended by someone insured by them. They denied my claim to cover them despite clear pictures pictures of being rear ended.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

Now my insurance will have to pay for something I didn't do because @StateFarm is a bunch of frauds. This is literally fraud. They don't take their job seriously. It might be a sales ploy "come here and we will never have you pay more". Sleep well at night knowing this.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

I asked the @StateFarm agent if she looked at the pictures. She said yes. I cross examined her like a lawyer. She had no answers for how the pictures look the way they do but their person didn't hit me.

[Andrew Ettinger @ahe23]

I just went to the body shop. They said - let me guess the other guy had @StateFarm - I said yes. He said all the time. They just deny hoping it goes away. He laughed as it isn't even a question how clear it is. They did a recorded statement. Then said denied.