Dessa: Conversation Model trained only on speech (block.xyz)

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

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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.

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

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?

- 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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.