>It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product

Or equivalently could have gone down as a "deepseek" moment in TTS if the model was open-sourced (I don't think even a paper was published). It's a bit strange, he never made any profit but also never ended up publishing anything even after it was shut down.

He's seemingly anti-AI now on Twitter and recently built a "no-AI" artist marketplace.

His users convinced him to close 15.ai, so it's unlikely the model will ever see the light of day.

There are thankfully a lot of high quality open source TTS models now.