Thinking Machines Just Announced More Human Like AI
What are "Interaction Models?" Mira Murati is brining a new twist to the future of AI experiences.
Good Morning,
Innovation in AI is occuring at many of the latest AI Research labs. This has huge ramifications for the future of AI.
What if AI models could deliver experiences that were more human like? As an avid user of Voice AI, I’ve often wondered about this. This week we finally got to see what Thinky is up to.
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, that has weirdly enough been mercilessly poached by OpenAI, and yet they have been able to attract some of Silicon Valley’s top AI talent. Thinky wants to move beyond the era of “turn-based” AI interactions and, I think they are on to something.
If they can pull it off, this will essentially deliver way more real and human-like AI interactions in real-time. Think about it, traditional AI models function sequentially—listening and then responding—whereas its new model aims for simultaneous input processing and response generation, akin to a phone call.
What are Interaction Models?
While Lilian is telling a story, the interaction model can track when she is thinking, yielding, self-correcting, or inviting a response; there is no specific built dialogue management system.
Lilian Weng is a Co-founder at Thinky.
Interaction Models are a new category of AI systems with micro-turn architecture, a system that processes data in 200ms chunks. This could literally make AI interactions a lot more useful in the real physical world and social world we actually live in. That’s more human-like for sure Thinky! Murati is no deer in the headlights, she’s just Albanian and the technical term for this is “full duplex,” and the company claims its model, TML-Interaction-Small, responds in 0.40 seconds, which is roughly the speed of natural human conversation and significantly faster than comparable models from OpenAI and Google.
I really dialed into this story since this will clearly lead to a lot of other interesting AI products. If you are a builder, developer, investor or power-user of AI - this is incredibly exciting.
A More Natural AI Interface is Emerging
Essentially AI should serve us but since 2023 we’ve been forced into bad interactions. There’s still a long ways to go. Thinking Machines argues that the back-and-forth interactions with current models forces human users to “contort themselves” to the interface. If you are a regular Voice AI user you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Could we have Benevolent AI that actually looks out for us?
Instead of AI trying to scam us with pleasing words?
Tessa's quality of life has improved a lot with some nagging.
I actually found this pretty funny and would be fine with an AI that nags me in a good way. Can we envision a time when AI is a benevolent advisor and implementer across human institutions and helping to guide humanity across civilization scale challenges? Perhaps like me you are familiar with how the concept of an artificial intelligence "Oversoul" is famously explored by author Orson Scott Card in his 5-book science fiction series, the Homecoming Saga.
For me, Interaction Models point to that world perhaps decades away.
So what would it be like to interact with an AI that isn’t so fake and contrived? The Interaction models have real potential to humanize AI in a way that I think is fairly positive. The interaction models is essentially a new AI system built to enable real-time, native collaboration across audio, video, and text without relying on external scaffolding. You an almost feel the feminine touch in Thinky’s product focus. AI doesn’t have to be awful and feel flawed and sycophantic. Is there a better way to represent and build products with this technology?
‘Full duplex’ simultaneous input/output processing
Thinking Machines is essentially here helping to solve the "collaboration bottleneck” in how we relate with AI in a more realistic manner.
“We think interactivity should scale alongside intelligence; the way we work with AI should not be treated as an afterthought. Interaction models let people collaborate with AI the way we naturally collaborate with each other—they continuously take in audio, video, and text, and think, respond, and act in real time.” - Thinking Machines Blog.
