If it really can replicate that low latency + that expressiveness on local devices, that's one heck of an accomplishment for "indie" AI.

This is like having on demand access to a conversational partner at all times. But there is no embarrassment factor, patience, or concern about wasting an instructors time. Because the model is trained entirely on audio and not a voice to text add on, you can provide a human extremely high quality feedback and training.

And it’s cheap to run.

It doesn’t need to be smart the way a SOTA LLM is smart. There’s tons of value here already. You can tack it onto another system for deep intelligence.

It honestly sounds a bit like a teenager's stream of consciousness to me, that's how they sound to me anyways.

There's so many potential scenarios. One scenario: An AI voice trainer trains on someone's social media video posts and get a pretty perfect copy. Then SIM jacks the target's phone number and calls pretending to need help. AIs could be used to mock ransom people, request bail money, ask for a change on a production server, etc.

People with high public visibility are likely targets, especially if they have money and or power. Impersonating them to subordinates would be an easy means of a social engineering attack.

This model is clearly not so smart. So the voice is the whole point, there’s not much value beyond it, at least on its own.

What that adds up to is, impersonation. That’s what this is for, impersonating humans.

The conversation with the AI fake wife was a little creepy, albeit honest about what this tech is probably going to be used for.

Also, the trend of posting on HN with much more sensationalist title first, getting to the front page, then getting the title adjusted by a moderator should probably be penalized; how is 'most authentic ever' not a marketing term? (not just this post, but a bunch of posts recently got to frontpage by making unreasonable claims)

LLMs need an insane amount of text. Dessa learned language from hundreds of times fewer words (in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is).

Now that a larger proportion of text is AI, I'm appreciating human-written text more and more; this got a good chuckle out of me.

It is kinda scary that we're here already, I can see this being pretty problematic for seniors/public prone to getting scammed.

[1] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/

we figured out how to train Dessa on only one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72.

This is the crazy part. It seems pretty smart, and LLMs require 1000x more compute to train. Can this kind of efficiency somehow be achieved with text too?

It is interesting that they've done this reasonably successfully, impressive technology. Novel ideas can have inherent value, absent direct uses they may have, as they can be a stepping stone toward other inventions. But, I'm having a hard time coming up with a use case that isn't predatory or intentionally misleading. Company support agents pretending to be human, for instance. Or, taking the next step on AI girlfriend/boyfriend type interactions. Or, outright scams. Models already do an excellent job with voice cloning, at least for intonation and timbre, adding realistic conversational tics makes it even more likely grandma is going to fall for it when her "nephew" calls needing help.

But, that seems to be extremely common with new tech these days. There's always an angle that is unsavory. Marketing, scams, propaganda, surveillance, killing, that's where the money is, so everything bends toward them.

- Text interface: Done

- Voice interface: 5-10 years I’ll predict

The demo is nice, but enough obstacles remain that very few people would mistake it for a human over even a 5 min conversation. Chat systems configured to intentionally impersonate can already get people to mistake them for humans most of the time.

There’s been great progress in this area, direct response modeling, parallel reasoning, but last challenges are huge.

The reality is LLMs still seem dumb much more often without significant reasoning time (test time inference). On that point alone they are still an order of magnitude too slow for convincing interactive latency.

Of course they don’t need to meet this bar to be useful, systems are good enough today for lots of applications. It will just be interesting to see what the final delta ends up being.

I like voice as a mode of interaction with AI, but it’s always been clear with current tech that I’m talking to AI (and yet folks still got drawn into fantasy relationships thanks to sycophantic models etc) - I imagine with voice models like Dessa that could be worse for humans. This kind of fidelity blurs the lines of who or what the human is talking to and lets humans fall into an isolated world where they believe they are “socializing.”

Now, we could argue this is not a negative, maybe it is actually healthy for those who are looking for social connection or lonely, but my gut feel is that is not the case for most. It worries me that this kind of model will actually cause further deterioration of human socialisation and human-to-human contact.

But the interesting part to me is that training on voice only is what allows models to learn emotions - voice transmits a lot of emotional information which text doesn't capture. Language has words for a very limited number of emotions - maybe only the peaks - but there's so many more which we can't describe or transmit via text.

You could determine the phonetic tokens which express different kinds of emotions or 'render' text+emotion using a DSL, etc. Exciting stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM

For real though, it's been bothering me, how did they do this in 2018? (Some kind of symbolic logic based AI?)

Also props to the people at Block, Dessa is very cool :)

The intelligence sounds lacking. At this point, anyway.

But the idea of learning through voice instead of written text might prove fruitful. After all, text isn't strictly native to humans. It's just a tool we've invented.

Also I seem to be missing where/how they are selling this.

Conventional LLMs are just running speech to text and then working on the text, so they can’t understand music or humming or any sort of sound.

Modern problems...

Where is this going?

The "Huge range in intonation and speed." example. "I had another ollie special". "I ordered a French vanilla latte, special from Maude [or is that Aldi?], springs and waffles, granny smith"...wtf does any of this mean?

She takes a sip of something and her "mouth is on fire...from all the sugar". She repeatedly calls herself "a ding".

Dessa: Hey, baby.

Block is in the AI girlfriend market? Ew.

At the same time, imagine if every book was like a living thing you could interact with and buying the book partially bought you access to the model that would tell you the story. The only way you would interact with that particular model, is if you bought the book.

It reads the book to you and you could chime in or it would know when to pause if there's an interruption without you needing to manually pause. You say hey wait, why is this character so angry? Then it kind of naturally reacts and continues the story. Maybe you come back to it 3 years later and it remembers you liked a certain part of the book and injects "here comes the good part!" It hears you start snoring and begins lowering its voice and whispering, but remembers you asked it to wake you up loudly if you start snoring, so it bolts out HEYWAKEUP!

For a lot of people books are a very solitary thing, though of course there are social clubs and book readings. Almost makes me think of those magical books you see fantasy wizards having, where the books themselves are sentient. It would be crazy if they released a The Princess Bride book and had the real narrator's voice and you could interrupt him and he could harass you about all your interruptions.

It wasn't that long ago where we were talking about having games and movies blend so the movies become interactive experiences. We're really getting closer to some of these static mediums becoming more like, trained behavioral meshes that have a personality and you can kind of naturally spend time with it. I'm not sure I'd be big on paintings on the wall coming to life and talking to you like in Harry Potter, but there's some promise.

Game worlds are an obvious extension, not just through NPCs, but if anyone remembers that game called Bastion where there was a narrator explaining the events as they went on. You could imagine a model that could watch you play and speak naturally, being funny or narrating. Almost something like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or how Beavis and Butthead would react to music videos.

I don't think those should be pervasive or the new norm, but there probably is an opportunity there and a market for it. Some kind of social-like presence that doesn't get tired, doesn't get bored, always has the same schedule you do, etc.

Hell, that reminds me of Seaman on the Dreamcast, too. SEGA could make a new Seaman and it would actually be awesome. Like a blend between Nintendogs, a fish, and some AI. There could even be charming goofy antics it tries to pull where it knows it's stuck inside a game and tries ridiculous things to manipulate you into letting it out. Some kind of Pinky and the Brain charm.

Anybody on board with this future?

I get you are excited to share, but taking into account what your product is, it would be more powerful to let people experience it. As a creator of digital products, why would you put so much text on the homepage, anyhow you get the point.

- Build advertising on their platform.

- Build AI girlfriends on their platform.

Gross. I mean it's not like the market isn't already thinking of doing that, it's not a leap of a conclusion. Just kind of gross to be on the nose about it with the content and choice of demos.

There's no male or neutral voice.

All examples are of white male software engineers talking to what I assume will be ultimately marketed as a 'girlfriend' bot (or used for love scams).

The single paragraph hand waving at the importance of 'safe AI empathy' doesn't dissuade me at all.

Sell your idea as what it is, yet another 'perfect' woman shaped object a hypothetical man can own and use how he likes.

Is having a duplex model constantly cutting in with uninteresting quips something people are looking for?