Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

Jack Dorsey’s Block announced an AI model called Dessa that’s trained “from scratch on nothing but human conversation,” and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny.

Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between the model and the speaker does have a mostly natural back and forth (though for some reason, the model initially mistakes the speaker for somebody named “Ronaldo”).

Here’s a video of Dessa playing a guessing game over voice:

The Dessa website features a few other examples, like a back-and-forth about Christopher Nolan’s films (including Dessa going on an unexpected tangent about Bryan Singer’s Superman films), a person telling Dessa about taking it on a surprise trip to Paris (to which Dessa, as the website describes, “then answers with what sounds like teary gratitude”), and a conversation between OpenAI’s GPT-Live-1 voice model and Dessa (where Dessa comes across as more natural). You can hear clips from some of those conversations in this video.

On the website, the Dessa team says that Dessa is a “true speech-to-speech model, and everything it knows came from human speech,” and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max “or better.” As for why they made it, the team gives the three reasons “curiosity (aka fun), better understanding between humans and AI, and safety,” and provided some more detail:

Babies learn to talk without ever seeing a word written down. We wanted to see if a model could too. It can. It’s just very hard.

Speech is the most natural interface to any intelligence, super or otherwise, and today’s voice AI wastes it. It flattens what we say into text and can’t keep up with human timing.

AI keeps gaining power and independence, and it’s still nearly deaf to the emotion in our voices. Imagine being in serious pain while a voice AI has no idea and just keeps going. That’s the safety problem. Dessa is a step toward fixing it.

The Dessa team says it will be giving “a small group of AI safety researchers” early access to the model.

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