Five items in the October 24 AI briefing: Block unveiled Dessa, a full-duplex voice model trained only on recordings of human conversation, with no text involved; Pathos AI closed a $237 million Series E and teamed up with Bristol Myers Squibb and Tempus AI on drugs for neurological diseases; AI video platform Higgsfield drew fresh investment from NVIDIA and TCV; Dayforce signed a deal to acquire AI interview company Ribbon AI; and the Anthropic public prospectus the market spent the day waiting for had still not appeared as this briefing went out.
Block Unveils Dessa: Learning to Talk From Human Speech Alone
On October 23, Block's in-house AI research lab unveiled Dessa, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model. According to the company, it was trained from scratch on nothing but recorded human conversation — no text, no pretrained models: audio in, audio out, listening and speaking at the same time, with interruptions, backchanneling, laughter and sighs all learned from real dialogue. Block says inference runs faster than real time and can run locally on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max chip or better; training used a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack, and the model saw hundreds of times fewer words than large language models. For now it is only a research preview: a public waitlist is open, early access goes to a small group of AI safety researchers, and parameter count, API, pricing, weights and benchmark results have all yet to be published — the evidence so far is Block's own demo recordings.
Pathos Raises $237 Million: Another Big Pharma Deal for Drug-Discovery AI
On October 23, Pathos AI announced a $237 million Series E led by Bristol Myers Squibb, valuing the company at about $3 billion. The same day it announced a collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb and Tempus AI to use AI in developing drugs for Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders: Tempus will build a dataset from hundreds of thousands of patients with neurological disorders, Pathos will license the data under a five-year, $55 million agreement, and its Pathos Foundry platform will generate and test hypotheses about disease biology and design more targeted, adaptive clinical trials. In return, Bristol Myers Squibb gains non-exclusive strategic access to Foundry across its broader portfolio, plus three-year exclusive rights to use the platform for its neuroscience programs. The funding will scale the Foundry platform and advance pipelines including the cancer drug JSKN016.
Higgsfield Draws NVIDIA and TCV Money: AI Video Keeps Attracting Capital
On October 23, AI video and image creation platform Higgsfield announced an extension of its Series B, with new investment from TCV and NVIDIA; the amount was not disclosed. The extension follows the $400 million Series B led by DST Global in August, which valued the company at $5.4 billion; the company says registered users have passed 40 million and its annualized revenue run rate has reached $1 billion — both figures are the company's own claims. Higgsfield's platform bundles around 35 third-party video models alongside its own engine, serving brands and creators producing visual content at scale; the new money goes to product, global infrastructure, hiring and go-to-market expansion. The announcement coincided with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's first visit to Kazakhstan, where most of the company's engineers are based.
Dayforce Acquires Ribbon AI: Interviewers Are Going Agentic Too
On October 23, human capital management company Dayforce announced it had signed an agreement to acquire Ribbon AI, an AI-native recruiting technology company; the price was not disclosed. Ribbon's conversational voice and video AI conducts candidate screening interviews at scale, with more than one million interviews completed for hundreds of customers, and it was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in enterprise for 2026. After the acquisition, Ribbon will strengthen Dayforce's agentic recruiting, aiming to make high-volume frontline hiring both faster and better for candidates, while recruiters keep their attention on the decisions that genuinely need a human.
One to Watch: Anthropic's Public Prospectus Has Not Arrived Yet
Multiple outlets, citing people familiar with the plans, had said Anthropic could publish its S-1 prospectus as early as October 23, but as this briefing went out, no public filing had appeared on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system. The draft figures that have circulated — first-half revenue of $16.3 billion and a net loss of more than $80 billion, mostly a non-cash accounting charge — remain press reporting on an unreleased draft, not a formal company disclosure; the November listing and a roadshow in the week of November 9 are likewise still market expectations. Only when the prospectus actually goes public will the books and the risk factors be settled.
