A British AI startup that makes realistic video avatars has almost doubled its valuation to $4bn (£3bn), in a boost for the UK technology sector. Synthesia was valued at $2.1bn last year and moved into new offices in central London, marking the moment with a ceremony attended by the Sadiq Khan, the city's mayor, and Peter Kyle, then technology secretary. On Monday, it announced its latest funding round, led by an existing investor, Google Ventures, had raised $200m and valued the British company at $4bn. Google Ventures is the search firm's venture capital arm. Synthesia uses human actors to generate digital avatars of people and also offers employers the ability to create replicas of their staff.

The Download: China's dying EV batteries, and why AI doomers are doubling down China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries. In the past decade, China has seen an EV boom, thanks in part to government support. Buying an electric car has gone from a novel decision to a routine one; by late 2025, nearly 60% of new cars sold were electric or plug-in hybrids. But as the batteries in China's first wave of EVs reach the end of their useful life, early owners are starting to retire their cars, and the country is now under pressure to figure out what to do with those aging components. The issue is putting strain on China's still-developing battery recycling industry and has given rise to a gray market that often cuts corners on safety and environmental standards.

When Synthesia launched in 2017, its primary purpose was to match AI versions of real human faces--for example, the former footballer David Beckham--with dubbed voices speaking in different languages. A few years later, in 2020, it started giving the companies that signed up for its services the opportunity to make professional-level presentation videos starring either AI versions of staff members or consenting actors. The avatars' body movements could be jerky and unnatural, their accents sometimes slipped, and the emotions indicated by their voices didn't always match their facial expressions. Now Synthesia's avatars have been updated with more natural mannerisms and movements, as well as expressive voices that better preserve the speaker's accent--making them appear more humanlike than ever before. For Synthesia's corporate clients, these avatars will make for slicker presenters of financial results, internal communications, or staff training videos.

There is concern that languages and dialects are being lost in the digital era. "Among the over seven thousand languages that still exist today, almost half are endangered according to UNESCO; about a third have some online presence; less than 2 percent are supported by Google Translate; and according to OpenAI's own testing, only fifteen, or 0.2 percent are supported by GPT-4 [an OpenAI model] above an 80 percent accuracy," writes Karen Hao in the book Empire of AI. "Language models are homogenising speech," agrees AI expert Henry Ajder, who advises governments and tech firms, including Synthesia. However, the better these products become, the more effective they will also be in the hands of scammers. Synthesia's product will not be free when it is released in the coming weeks, and will have guardrails around hate speech and explicit material. But there are already many free, open-source voice-cloning tools which are easily accessible and less protected.

It's 2025, so it should be no surprise that another organization has sold its soul (entered into a licensing deal with an AI company) for an undisclosed sum. A new partnership allows UK-based Synthesia to access Shutterstock's content library for training its latest AI model, EXPRESS-2. This deal isn't the first of its kind for Shutterstock, which previously teamed up with OpenAI to sell stock images made using AI generator DALL-E 2. Synthesia creates avatars for corporate videos about topics such as cybersecurity and good communication at work. It aims to use Shutterstock's video data to "try out new approaches that will improve the performance of EXPRESS-2, and increase the realism and expressiveness of our AI generated avatars, bringing them closer to human-like performances.," Synthesia stated in a release. Typically, Synthesia uses actors to create avatars, paying to use their likeness for three years.

A 2bn ( 1.6bn) British startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate realistic avatars has struck a licensing deal with the stock footage firm Shutterstock to help develop its technology. Synthesia will pay the US-based Shutterstock an undisclosed sum to use its library of corporate video footage to train its latest AI model. It expects that incorporating the clips into its model will produce even more realistic expressions, vocal tones and body language from the avatars. "Thanks to this partnership with Shutterstock, we hope to try out new approaches that will … increase the realism and expressiveness of our AI generated avatars, bringing them closer to human-like performances," said Synthesia. Synthesia uses human actors to generate digital avatars of people, which are then deployed by companies in corporate videos in a range of scenarios such as advising on cybersecurity, calculating water bills and how to communicate better at work.

The well-groomed young man dressed in a crisp, blue shirt speaking with a soft American accent seems an unlikely supporter of the junta leader of the west African state of Burkina Faso. "We must support … President Ibrahim Traoré … Homeland or death we shall overcome!" he says in a video that began circulating in early 2023 on Telegram. It was just a few months after the dictator had come to power via a military coup. Other videos fronted by different people, with a similar professional-looking appearance and repeating the exact same script in front of the Burkina Faso flag, cropped up around the same time. On a verified account on X a few days later the same young man, in the same blue shirt, claimed to be Archie, the chief executive of a new cryptocurrency platform. They were generated with artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a startup based in east London.

No one else is able to do that," says Jack Saunders, a researcher at the University of Bath, who was not involved in Synthesia's work. The full-body avatars he previewed are very good, he says, despite small errors such as hands "slicing" into each other at times. But "chances are you're not really going to be looking that close to notice it," Saunders says. Synthesia launched its first version of hyperrealistic AI avatars, also known as deepfakes, in April. These avatars use large language models to match expressions and tone of voice to the sentiment of spoken text.

Roboticists believe that, using new AI techniques, they can unlock more capable robots that can move freely through unfamiliar environments and tackle challenges they've never seen before. But something is standing in the way: lack of access to the types of data used to train robots so they can interact with the physical world. It's far harder to come by than the data used to train the most advanced AI models, and that scarcity is one of the main things currently holding progress in robotics back. As a result, leading companies and labs are in fierce competition to find new and better ways to gather the data they need. It's led them down strange paths, like using robotic arms to flip pancakes for hours on end.

Synthesia has managed to create AI avatars that are remarkably humanlike after only one year of tinkering with the latest generation of generative AI. It's equally exciting and daunting thinking about where this technology is going. It will soon be very difficult to differentiate between what is real and what is not, and this is a particularly acute threat given the record number of elections happening around the world this year. We are not ready for what is coming. If people become too skeptical about the content they see, they might stop believing in anything at all, which could enable bad actors to take advantage of this trust vacuum and lie about the authenticity of real content.