Milliman analysis: Public pension funded ratio drops to 79.5% in March
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 18, 2025--
Milliman, Inc., a premier global consulting and actuarial firm, today released the latest results of its Public Pension Funding Index (PPFI), which analyzes data from the nation's 100 largest public defined benefit plans.
After two months of stability, the Milliman 100 PPFI funded ratio fell in March from 81.1% as of February 28 to 79.5% as of March 31. Trade and tariff uncertainty drove this result, as the plans experienced estimated aggregate monthly returns of -1.6%. Individual plans' returns ranged from -3.1% to -0.1%. Investment losses erased $83 billion in combined market value and left the PPFI plans with $5.198 trillion in assets as of March 31.
Meanwhile plan liabilities grew during the month, from $6.523 trillion at the end of February to $6.538 trillion at the end of March. This caused the gap between plan assets and liabilities to expand from $1.233 trillion at the beginning of March to $1.340 trillion as of March 31.
'Market volatility during March pushed five plans below the 90% funding mark, leaving only 25 plans above this key threshold,' said Becky Sielman, co-author of Milliman's PPFI. 'Still, on the lower end of the spectrum, only 12 plans are less than 60% funded, compared to 11 last month, in an optimistic sign for the overall health of public pensions.'
Read this month's complete Public Pension Funding Index or Milliman's full range of annual Pension Funding Studies. To receive regular updates of Milliman's pension funding analysis, contact us at [email protected].
About Milliman
Milliman leverages deep expertise, actuarial rigor, and advanced technology to develop solutions for a world at risk. We help clients in the public and private sectors navigate urgent, complex challenges—from extreme weather and market volatility to financial insecurity and rising health costs—so they can meet their business, financial, and social objectives. Our solutions encompass insurance, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, and employee benefits. Founded in 1947, Milliman is an independent firm with offices in major cities around the globe. Visit us at milliman.com.
View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250418368657/en/
CONTACT: Becky Sielman
Milliman, Inc.
Tel: +1 860 687 0125
[email protected]
KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA WASHINGTON
INDUSTRY KEYWORD: CONSULTING PRIMARY/SECONDARY EDUCATION PROFESSIONAL SERVICES LABOR ASSET MANAGEMENT CONGRESSIONAL NEWS/VIEWS PUBLIC POLICY/GOVERNMENT FINTECH HUMAN RESOURCES FINANCE
SOURCE: Milliman, Inc.
Copyright Business Wire 2025.
PUB: 04/18/2025 12:05 PM/DISC: 04/18/2025 12:05 PM
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250418368657/en
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Wire
43 minutes ago
- Business Wire
Hanabi AI Launches OpenAudio S1: The World's First AI Voice Actor for Real-Time Emotional Control
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Hanabi AI, a pioneering voice technology startup, today announced OpenAudio S1, the world's first AI voice actor and a breakthrough generative voice model that delivers unprecedented real-time emotional and tonal control. Moving beyond the limitations of traditional text-to-speech solutions, OpenAudio S1 creates nuanced, emotionally authentic vocal output that captures the full spectrum of human expression. The OpenAudio S1 model is available in open beta today on for everyone to try for free. 'We believe the future of AI voice-driven storytelling isn't just about generating speech—it's about performance,' said Shijia Liao, founder and CEO of Hanabi AI. 'With OpenAudio S1, we're shaping what we see as the next creative frontier: AI voice acting.' From Synthesized Text-to-Speech Output to AI Voice Performance At the heart of OpenAudio S1's innovation is transforming voice from merely a functional tool into a core element of storytelling. Rather than treating speech as a scripted output to synthesize, Hanabi AI views it as a performance to direct—complete with emotional depth, intentional pacing, and expressive nuance. Whether it's the trembling hesitation of suppressed anxiety before delivering difficult news, or the fragile excitement of an unexpected reunion, OpenAudio S1 allows users to control and fine tune vocal intensity, emotional resonance, and prosody in real time making voice output not just sound realistic, but feel authentically human. 'Voice is one of the most powerful ways to convey emotion, yet it's the most nuanced, the hardest to replicate, and the key to making machines feel truly human,' Liao emphasized, 'But it's been stuck in a text-to-speech mindset for too long. Ultimately, the difference between machine-generated speech and human speech comes down to emotional authenticity. It's not just what you say but how you say it. OpenAudio S1 is the first AI speech model that gives creators the power to direct voice acting as if they were working with a real human actor.' State-of-the-Art Model Meets Controllability and Speed Hanabi AI fuels creative vision with a robust technical foundation. OpenAudio S1 is powered by an end-to-end architecture with 4 billion parameters, trained extensively on diverse text and audio datasets. This advanced setup empowers S1 to capture emotional nuance and vocal subtleties with remarkable accuracy. Fully integrated into the platform, S1 is accessible to a broad range of users—from creators generating long-form content in minutes to creative professionals fine-tuning every vocal inflection. According to third-party benchmarks from Hugging Face's TTS Arena, OpenAudio S1 demonstrated consistent gains across key benchmarks, outperforming ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Cartesia in key areas: Expressiveness – S1 delivers more nuanced emotional expression and tonal variation, handling subtleties like sarcasm, joy, sadness, and fear with cinematic depth, unlike the limited emotional scope of current competing models. Ultra-low latency – S1 offers sub-100ms latency, making it ideal for real-time applications like gaming, voice assistants, and live content creation where immediate response time is crucial. Competitors, like Cartesia and OpenAI, still experience higher latency, resulting in a less natural, more robotic response in real-time interactive settings. Real-time fine-grained controllability – With S1, users can adjust tone, pitch, emotion, and pace in real time, using not only simple prompts such as (angry) or (voice quivering), but also a diverse range of more nuanced or creative instructions such as (confident but hiding fear) or (whispering with urgency). This allows for incredibly flexible and expressive voice generation tailored to a wide range of contexts and characters. State-of-the-art voice cloning – Accurately replicates a speaker's rhythm, pacing, and timbre. Multilingual, multi-speaker fluency – S1 seamlessly performs across 11 languages, excelling at handling multi-speaker environments (such as dialogues with multiple characters) in multilingual contexts, supporting seamless transitions between different languages without losing tonal consistency. Pioneering Research Vision For the Future OpenAudio S1 is just the first chapter. Hanabi's long-term mission is to build a true AI companion that doesn't just process information but connects with human emotion, intent, and presence. While many voice models today produce clear speech they still fall short of true emotional depth, and struggle to support the kind of trust, warmth, and natural interaction required of an AI companion. Instead of treating voice as an output layer, Hanabi treats it as the emotional core of the AI experience, because for an AI companion to feel natural, its voice must convey real feeling and connection. To bring this vision to life, Hanabi advances both research and product in parallel. The company operates through two complementary divisions: OpenAudio, Hanabi's internal research lab, focuses on developing breakthrough voice models and advancing emotional nuance, real-time control, and speech fidelity. Meanwhile, Fish Audio serves as Hanabi's product arm, delivering a portfolio of accessible applications that bring these technological advancements directly to consumers. Looking ahead, the company plans to progressively release core parts of OpenAudio's architecture, training pipeline, and inference stack to the public. Real-World Impact with Scalable Innovation With a four-people Gen Z founding team, the company scaled its annualized revenue from $400,000 to over $5 million between January and April 2025, while growing its MAU from 50,000 to 420,000 through Fish Audio's early products—including real-time performance tools and long-form audio generation. This traction reflects the team's ability to turn cutting-edge innovation into product experiences that resonate with a fast-growing creative community. The founder & CEO, Shijia Liao, has spent over seven years in the field and been active in open-source AI development. Prior to Fish Audio, he led or participated in the development of several widely adopted speech and singing voice synthesis models—including So-VITS-SVC, GPT-SoVITS, Bert-VITS2, and Fish Speech—which remain influential in the research and creative coding communities today. That open-source foundation built both the technical core and the community trust that now powers early commercial momentum. For a deeper dive into the research and philosophy behind OpenAudio S1, check out our launch blog post here: Pricing & Availability Premium Membership (unlimited generation on Fish Audio Playground): - $15 per month - $120 per year API: $15 per million UTF-8 bytes (approximately 20 hours of audio) About Hanabi AI Hanabi AI Inc. is pioneering the era of the AI Voice Actor —speech that you can direct as easily as video, shaping every inflection, pause, and emotion in real time. Built on our open-source roots, the Fish Audio platform gives filmmakers, streamers, and everyday creators frame-perfect control over how their stories sound.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Hanabi AI Launches OpenAudio S1: The World's First AI Voice Actor for Real-Time Emotional Control
SAN FRANCISCO, June 04, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Hanabi AI, a pioneering voice technology startup, today announced OpenAudio S1, the world's first AI voice actor and a breakthrough generative voice model that delivers unprecedented real-time emotional and tonal control. Moving beyond the limitations of traditional text-to-speech solutions, OpenAudio S1 creates nuanced, emotionally authentic vocal output that captures the full spectrum of human expression. The OpenAudio S1 model is available in open beta today on for everyone to try for free. "We believe the future of AI voice-driven storytelling isn't just about generating speech—it's about performance," said Shijia Liao, founder and CEO of Hanabi AI. "With OpenAudio S1, we're shaping what we see as the next creative frontier: AI voice acting." From Synthesized Text-to-Speech Output to AI Voice Performance At the heart of OpenAudio S1's innovation is transforming voice from merely a functional tool into a core element of storytelling. Rather than treating speech as a scripted output to synthesize, Hanabi AI views it as a performance to direct—complete with emotional depth, intentional pacing, and expressive nuance. Whether it's the trembling hesitation of suppressed anxiety before delivering difficult news, or the fragile excitement of an unexpected reunion, OpenAudio S1 allows users to control and fine tune vocal intensity, emotional resonance, and prosody in real time making voice output not just sound realistic, but feel authentically human. "Voice is one of the most powerful ways to convey emotion, yet it's the most nuanced, the hardest to replicate, and the key to making machines feel truly human," Liao emphasized, "But it's been stuck in a text-to-speech mindset for too long. Ultimately, the difference between machine-generated speech and human speech comes down to emotional authenticity. It's not just what you say but how you say it. OpenAudio S1 is the first AI speech model that gives creators the power to direct voice acting as if they were working with a real human actor." State-of-the-Art Model Meets Controllability and Speed Hanabi AI fuels creative vision with a robust technical foundation. OpenAudio S1 is powered by an end-to-end architecture with 4 billion parameters, trained extensively on diverse text and audio datasets. This advanced setup empowers S1 to capture emotional nuance and vocal subtleties with remarkable accuracy. Fully integrated into the platform, S1 is accessible to a broad range of users—from creators generating long-form content in minutes to creative professionals fine-tuning every vocal inflection. According to third-party benchmarks from Hugging Face's TTS Arena, OpenAudio S1 demonstrated consistent gains across key benchmarks, outperforming ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Cartesia in key areas: Expressiveness – S1 delivers more nuanced emotional expression and tonal variation, handling subtleties like sarcasm, joy, sadness, and fear with cinematic depth, unlike the limited emotional scope of current competing models. Ultra-low latency – S1 offers sub-100ms latency, making it ideal for real-time applications like gaming, voice assistants, and live content creation where immediate response time is crucial. Competitors, like Cartesia and OpenAI, still experience higher latency, resulting in a less natural, more robotic response in real-time interactive settings. Real-time fine-grained controllability – With S1, users can adjust tone, pitch, emotion, and pace in real time, using not only simple prompts such as (angry) or (voice quivering), but also a diverse range of more nuanced or creative instructions such as (confident but hiding fear) or (whispering with urgency). This allows for incredibly flexible and expressive voice generation tailored to a wide range of contexts and characters. State-of-the-art voice cloning – Accurately replicates a speaker's rhythm, pacing, and timbre. Multilingual, multi-speaker fluency – S1 seamlessly performs across 11 languages, excelling at handling multi-speaker environments (such as dialogues with multiple characters) in multilingual contexts, supporting seamless transitions between different languages without losing tonal consistency. Pioneering Research Vision For the Future OpenAudio S1 is just the first chapter. Hanabi's long-term mission is to build a true AI companion that doesn't just process information but connects with human emotion, intent, and presence. While many voice models today produce clear speech they still fall short of true emotional depth, and struggle to support the kind of trust, warmth, and natural interaction required of an AI companion. Instead of treating voice as an output layer, Hanabi treats it as the emotional core of the AI experience, because for an AI companion to feel natural, its voice must convey real feeling and connection. To bring this vision to life, Hanabi advances both research and product in parallel. The company operates through two complementary divisions: OpenAudio, Hanabi's internal research lab, focuses on developing breakthrough voice models and advancing emotional nuance, real-time control, and speech fidelity. Meanwhile, Fish Audio serves as Hanabi's product arm, delivering a portfolio of accessible applications that bring these technological advancements directly to consumers. Looking ahead, the company plans to progressively release core parts of OpenAudio's architecture, training pipeline, and inference stack to the public. Real-World Impact with Scalable Innovation With a four-people Gen Z founding team, the company scaled its annualized revenue from $400,000 to over $5 million between January and April 2025, while growing its MAU from 50,000 to 420,000 through Fish Audio's early products—including real-time performance tools and long-form audio generation. This traction reflects the team's ability to turn cutting-edge innovation into product experiences that resonate with a fast-growing creative community. The founder & CEO, Shijia Liao, has spent over seven years in the field and been active in open-source AI development. Prior to Fish Audio, he led or participated in the development of several widely adopted speech and singing voice synthesis models—including So-VITS-SVC, GPT-SoVITS, Bert-VITS2, and Fish Speech—which remain influential in the research and creative coding communities today. That open-source foundation built both the technical core and the community trust that now powers early commercial momentum. For a deeper dive into the research and philosophy behind OpenAudio S1, check out our launch blog post here: Pricing & Availability Premium Membership (unlimited generation on Fish Audio Playground): - $15 per month- $120 per year API: $15 per million UTF-8 bytes (approximately 20 hours of audio) About Hanabi AI Hanabi AI Inc. is pioneering the era of the AI Voice Actor—speech that you can direct as easily as video, shaping every inflection, pause, and emotion in real time. Built on our open-source roots, the Fish Audio platform gives filmmakers, streamers, and everyday creators frame-perfect control over how their stories sound. View source version on Contacts Media Contact: Derek Huangdderekhuang@ Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
The yellow We Care Pedicabs are back in downtown SF
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) —Whether it's a school bus or a taxi, people are used to getting around in yellow vehicles. But now, a way to get around in a yellow pedicab is back in downtown Sioux Falls for the summer. If you're in downtown Sioux Falls on the weekends, there's a good chance you might see a bright yellow pedicab driving people around. RJ Oladejo is one of the new operators of the We Care Pedicabs. He rides for a few different reasons. 1 'critically' injured, no arrests in early morning shooting 'Getting these calves right and these calves right and the quads right. And just meeting different people all around Sioux Falls, people that visit, and just having a good conversation and enjoying the birds and the breeze and stuff like that,' Oladejo said. It's the second season that Terry Liggins and his nonprofit Hurdle Life Coach Foundation have been operating the pedicabs. 'It took a while to get the locals on board with what was happening. But plenty of the people that were at hotels and visiting our downtown, they would recognize the cabs and get on there as well. And so it was a lot of fun, super dynamic and well received,' Liggins, said. Out of the over 200 rides given last year, 40 of them were for free. This gave Liggins a new idea for this year: to try to implement a voucher program, where people or businesses could sponsor rides. 'Sometimes we're down here somewhere and we're seeing our adults who are transient, moving between the library and the banquet or the Bishop Dudley, and they're carrying a lot of weight,' Liggins said. While you may be the ones riding in the cab, it affects much more than just you. Proceeds from the We Care Pedicabs goes to benefit the Hurdle Life Coach Foundation and all the people they work with. 'Helping people out, you put in something that's got a good initiative for the youth and people around the community. So I embraced it,' Oladejo said. The operators are usually involved with the foundation or just believe in its message. 'Ideally, what we want to do with our operators is created as a workforce development opportunity for the adults. We're supporting transition. And that's not the only person who can volunteer, because we have people that are just like cycle enthusiasts, people who just want to look for another creative way to get some physical exercise and do some cardio,' Liggins said. Helping people get places, both in life and in downtown Sioux Falls. The best way to catch a ride on the Pedicabs is to hail them when you see them. Click here for more information on the We Care Pedicabs. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
