Fox: Big tech AI labs build models disconnected from actual customer needs
Dylan Fox · AssemblyAI Now Handles 4x YouTube's Daily Volume · Jul 31, 2026 · at 12:52
Dylan Fox, CEO of AssemblyAI, explains why his company's research and engineering team develops more commercially efficient models than large tech labs.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We have an amazing team of engineers, of researchers that just operate so closely to customers that they really understand, like, how this stuff is being deployed. I think that's the biggest difference between us and, like, a lab at a bigger company. So, you know, we have a lot of researchers, research engineers that will come to assembly from a bigger company. And they're so far removed from the customer. So they just create their model, they benchmark it, and then it's like, okay, I'm done.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dylan Fox
Fox: Coding Agents Have Expanded AssemblyAI's TAM by 100x
“So I think about this as like our TAM has just increased by a hundred X because we're not just selling to engineering teams within product companies. It's now like any, anyone.”
Fox: Most AI note-takers use AssemblyAI as voice infrastructure
“And so the reason, you know, most AI note takers are using assembly as the voice infrastructure is because our models are the most scalable, right?”
Fox: Training data drives roughly 75 percent of AI model performance
“It's really, probably, like, 75% of it is, like, the data that you're training on. Like, I would say for any AI model, it's like, there's always, like, you know, like, these, like, step functions and, like, algorithms and architectures and stuff, but the data …”
Fox: Callers hang up immediately if voice agents disclose they are AI
“If our customers, if they're building a voice agent and you disclose up front that you're an AI, people just hang up versus if you don't, people continue.”
Fox: AssemblyAI processes four times YouTube's daily audio volume on peak weeks
“And so now, you know, on a given week, on a peak week, there'll be something like over a hundred and twenty million conversations, voice conversations going through our platform, over two million hours of voice, which as of December of this past year was four,…”
Fox: Lawn care chains use Lovable and Cursor to build on AssemblyAI
“We saw this, like, small business, like, lawn care chain sign up, and, you know, we're like, what do they do with the API? And a lot of these small businesses are automating parts of their back office using Lovable, or Cloud Code, or Cursor, or whatever, Repli…”