AI audio company ElevenLabs‘ co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski believes that AI models will be commoditized over time, a revealing comment for a company focused today on building them.
Speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Tuesday, the ElevenLabs founder was discussing both his short-term and long-term views of the AI audio space.
Staniszewski said that his company’s researchers have been able to crack some of the model architecture challenges, and this focus will continue in the audio space for the next year or two.
“Over the long term, it will commoditize — over the next couple of years,” Staniszewski said. “Even if there’s differences — which I think will be the truth for some voices, some languages — on its own, the differences will be smaller.”
Asked why ElevenLabs would focus on building models if he believed they would be commoditized in time, Staniszewski explained that, in the short term, they were still the “biggest advantage and the biggest step change you can have today.”
For instance, if the AI voices or interactions don’t sound good, that’s still a problem that needs to be solved.
“The only way to solve it is… building the models yourself, and then, over the long term, there will be other players that will solve that, too,” said Staniszewski.
He also noted that those looking for reliable, scalable use cases would still likely use different models for different use cases.
However, in the next year or two, Staniszewski said that an increasing number of models will move into multi-modal or fused approaches.
“So, you will create audio and video at the same time, or audio and LLMs at the same time in a conversational setting,” he said, pointing to Google’s Veo 3 as an example of what can be achieved when combining models together.
The founder said that ElevenLabs plans to launch partnerships with other companies and work with open source technologies to see if the company can combine its audio expertise with some of the expertise of other models.
For ElevenLabs, the goal is to focus on both model building and applications to create long-term value, he said.
“The same way software and hardware was the magic for Apple, we think the product and AI will be the magic for the generation of the best use cases,” he added.
