GenAI's Velocity Continues: Here's What Moved the Needle for Builders this Week

Originally published on LinkedIn.

Thoughts are my own and don’t reflect Apple’s views — just my perspective on important news for AI Builders and Entrepreneurs from June 9th to June 13th.

If you're building in AI, this week saw shifts in the economics of reasoning models and new opportunities in the audio/video space. This weeks releases change what's doable, what's affordable, and where the business opportunities are opening up.

1. Model Economics Are Changing...Rapidly.

OpenAI slashed prices by 80% for its o3 model ($2/$8 pricing), making high-reasoning, agent-capable models viable for everyday applications. Builders can now economically orchestrate agents and build workflows previously too costly to scale. The pricing change is already showing up in tools that use the first-party API, like the Cursor IDE.

This pricing shift might mean it's time to revisit your roadmap. Advanced reasoning, agent-based tools and the use of reasoning models as coding assistants just became a lot more accessible to small companies and entrepreneurs.

2. AI Video and Voice Tools Are Ready for Real Work (and making money)

This week solidified video and voice generation as serious business tools, not just experimental tech. It’s no longer about whether you can generate media, but how you leverage it to better communicate your message. I expect to see an explosion of AI video in the coming months as builders and marketers create more audience specific content.

• Google's Veo3 now available to Pro users, making the worlds most powerful video generation tool available to millions more people.
• The NBA Finals featured a high-octane, fully AI-scripted, prompted and AI-voiced ad from prediction platform Kalshi, generative media is now prime-time ready.
• ByteDance released a new AI video generator that's rapidly climbing leaderboards, capable of multi-shot storytelling and character consistency in high-resolution, short-form video. This democratizes high-quality video production further.
• Amazon's AI-powered video ad tools make professional-quality advertising achievable for small teams. I expect to see a ton of opportunity here to work with Amazon sellers
• ElevenLabs’ new voice model (Elevan v3 Alpha) introduces emotional nuance, significantly boosting realism for podcasts, audiobooks, and marketing.

Audio and video capabilities are now robust enough to serve as core offerings. It's worth considering how you might leverage these for new business opportunities, from dynamic marketing content to hyper-personalized educational materials. The barrier to entry for professional-grade media is quickly becoming constrained only by the creativity of the individual.

3. Platform & Infrastructure Moves are Redefining Opportunity

• Meta doubles down on AGI: Meta is reportedly investing up to $14.8 billion to buy a 49% stake in Scale AI and poaching its CEO and top engineers for Zuck's "Super Group" of AGI All-Stars. This underscores how much competition there is for AI talent, especially AI researchers. Zuck is reportedly offering up to 9-figure contracts for top AI talent.
• AMD steps up: AMD unveiled its next-gen Instinct MI400 series AI chips, with OpenAI affirming their use. Positioning itself as a lower-cost alternative to Nvidia, this introduces crucial competition in AI hardware.
• Apple’s WWDC offered limited AI insights, creating temporary space for faster-moving AI startups and developers.

These large-scale infrastructure investments and hardware innovations mean the foundation for building advanced AI is becoming more robust and potentially more accessible.

4. Reality Check: AI Content Still Needs Human Smarts & Policy Is Slow but Catching Up

While GenAI capabilities soar, this week also served as a reminder that the human element remains in the driver seat, and the regulatory landscape is evolving faster than expected in the US.

• Anthropic's "Claude Explains" experiment quietly ended. After just one week, their AI-written blog was pulled. This is a crucial lesson about the state of AI: while it can generate content, the need for human oversight, fact-checking, and editorial judgment for credibility are still very much needed. While AI can help to generate content it still can't replace the human element of taste and creativity.
• Evolving AI Policy & Ethics: US states are actively legislating around AI. The growing regulatory patchwork could make scaling challenging for companies with a single regulatory strategy. It also opens new opportunities for startups building AI governance and compliance solutions to bridge the gaps.

Your old assumptions about cost, capability, and what's truly possible in areas like AI-driven rich media and intelligent agents are now obsolete. For builders, the imperative is clear: reassess your roadmap now. Capitalize on these unprecedented opportunities, secure your competitive advantage, and pioneer the next wave of innovation responsibly. The time for decisive action is this week.

The message from this week is unmistakeable: AI video content is fundamentally changing Marketing and Advertising. The cost of creating high quality video content is no longer what constrains organizations - they're now only constrained by the creativity of their people.

Other Notable News (Quick Hits for Builders):

• Sam Altman made a blog post "Gentle Singularity," a rose colored view of OpenAI’s long-term vision around intelligence, alignment, and acceleration.
• Altman also confirmed OpenAI’s open-source model has been pushed to mid-summer, teasing that it’ll be “worth the wait.”
• Builders can now select which model powers Custom GPTs, letting them optimize for either speed or depth based on use case.
• Apple’s WWDC lacked major AI reveals, drawing criticism for missed opportunities and continues to catch heat from all directions for the article "The Illusion of Thinking".
• Lovable funding round values it at $1.5B with just...28 employees.
• Magistral and Flux released new models, expanding access to lightweight and more vertically focused models.

#AI #AIbuilders #GenerativeAI #AIinvesting #AIpolicy #OpenAI #AMD #Veo3 #ElevenLabs #ByteDance #AIEconomics #FutureOfWork #AIethics

Written by JD Fetterly - Data Governance PM @ Apple, Founder at ChatBotLabs.io, and Generative AI enthusiast.