On December 9th, according to Fortune, Alexis Conneau, the former head of voice R & D at OpenAI and the head of voice capabilities at ChatGPT, announced the creation of WaveForms, which has received a $40 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The company was co-founded with business strategist Coralie Lamaitre to focus on emotional general intelligence (EGI) research and development, aiming to develop audio LLM that can understand the nuances of speech such as tone, intonation and accent.