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By David Franklin on June 6, 2025 in Technology
The big news this week is that the AI Engineer World’s Fair took place in San Francisco, with over 3,000 attendees! This is the third year it has been run, and it’s growing exponentially. Google launched the latest version of Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT can now record meetings, and OpenAI released several new connectors for external apps including Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Google Drive. Lastly, Hume.ai launched EVI 3, an incredible new speech-language model.
Let’s dig in!
AI Engineer
What happened
The AI Engineer World’s Fair has become one of the largest and most respected AI conferences of the year. It’s a fairly technical conference geared towards AI engineers. They bring in the top AI labs, founders and Fortune 500 CTOs for three days of sessions covering 16 different tracks, including everything from MCP (the hottest thing right now) to AI Infrastructure and Generative Media. All the sessions are recorded and livestreamed as well as made available on YouTube for anyone to watch.
Why it matters
I know that most of you aren’t AI engineers, and so this is not necessarily the most exciting news, but back in 1927, the fifth Solvay Conference was held in Brussels, Belgium. The theme was “Electrons and Photons”, and it was attended by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli, Marie Curie and others. Well, that’s the conference where they established the foundation for the Standard Model of Physics, one of the most important, powerful and meaningful frameworks for understanding how the universe works and the basis for all modern technologies. This conference is shaping up to be equally as important as we define the basis for Agentic AI and the future of human-AI interaction.
What happened
Google DeepMind announced the latest version of Gemini Pro 2.5 live on stage at the AI Engineer World’s Fair (which, confusingly, doesn’t increment the version number). But suffice to say that this current iteration is better in every way, including a 24-point ELO jump (ELO is a rating system used to calculate the relative skill level of players in a zero-sum game, like chess, where one player wins and the other loses) on LMArena (one of the leading LLM benchmarks), taking first place and a 35-point jump on WebDev Arena, also taking first place!
Why it matters
What is most meaningful here is that Google, being one of the largest players in the space, is radically transforming from search to AI as their core competency, revolutionizing several industries in the process. I’ve recently learned that we’re distributing many of our AI strategies across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google because each has their strengths and weaknesses, so it’s good to see that we have access to the best of the best.
OpenAI
What happened
OpenAI announced that ChatGPT can now record meetings, and they also released several new connectors for external apps including Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, OneDrive and Google Drive. These connectors allow you to directly integrate with these third-party services to search through your documents or review content in your inbox. This sounds pretty amazing, and you can imagine the power (and risk, I suppose) of giving the AI access to your content.
Why it matters
Recording meetings using AI tools has become all the rage, and seeing OpenAI step into that arena is pretty exciting. Adding connectors will dramatically expand the use cases for business users and continue to reduce the amount of time we squishy humans have to spend on boring, repetitive tasks. This is a fantastic use case for many of us who are interacting with clients, colleagues and tenants. It also allows for quick and easy summarization of all the content of a meeting, keeping everyone on the same page.
Hume.ai
What happened
Hume.ai launched EVI 3, an incredible new speech-language model that allows users to custom design a voice based upon a simple description of what they are interested in hearing. We are in the mind-blowing world of generative AI that can create realistic voices, which can be customized in very powerful ways in just a few minutes. You should really try it out yourself, as it is super easy and quite impressive!
Why it matters
Many of the tools Yardi is building utilize voice as a primary mode of interaction. Think about our chatbots built into Chat IQ or CRM IQ, for example. These tools generate speech based on text that is fed into them. One of the challenges we face is how to get the inflection right, as text-to-speech doesn’t have an obvious way to control it other than basic punctuation. The ability to create custom voices like this could allow us to unlock a much more subtle inflection with substantially more control. An agent who is trying to renew a lease might have quite a different tone than one that is trying to collect outstanding rent, for example.
Thank you all for tuning in. Please subscribe to be notified whenever a new post comes out, and we look forward to seeing you on the next one.
Stay curious, my friends!
-David
Author bio
David is the industry principal of AI at Yardi, where he works closely with the sales team to help clients understand how Yardi’s solutions align with their business needs. A real estate technology, AI and IT guru with deep sales expertise and entrepreneurial roots, David brings decades of experience bridging the gap between technical innovation and real-world application. David’s superpower is making complex technical concepts approachable, interesting and easy to understand — especially for non-technical audiences. When he’s not working, you can find him skiing, rock climbing or racing his Tesla.
Disclaimer
This article is for general information purposes only. The opinions, analysis and commentary expressed are not and cannot be relied on as legal advice, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Yardi Systems, Inc., or any of its affiliates.
