Interaction Models

These videos are worth a watch. There are tons of impressive moments, but they had me at the very first one where a woman says: "I'm going to tell you a story," and then pauses for a long, luxurious sip from a cup of coffee, and the model ... does nothing, just waits. Take my money.

Speaking of taking my money, what's the economic model for a company like this? They've published a fair amount about their architecture - enough that I imagine frontier labs could implement. Patents? Trade secrets? It's hard for me to understand how you'd be able to beat that training compute and knowhow at Anthropic/GOOG/oAI/Meta without some sort of legal protection.

I can't wait to see what these model architectures do with like 30-40% lower latency and more model intelligence. Very appealing. For reference, these look to be roughly 1/10 the size of Opus 4.7 / GPT 5.x series -- 275B, 12B active. So there's lots of room to add intelligence, and lots of hope that we could see lower latency.

The noteworthy things to me are that the architecture is a transformer that takes in text, image, and audio input and produces text and audio output, all trained together, and it works in near real-time through interleaving inputs and outputs rather than pure generation of the output from a given prompt.

> Time-Aligned Micro-Turns. The interaction model works with micro-turns continuously interleaving the processing of 200ms worth of input and generation of 200ms worth of output. Rather than consuming a complete user-turn and generating a complete response, both input and output tokens are treated as streams. Working with 200ms chunks of these streams enables near real-time concurrency of multiple input and output modalities.

That's probably the main thing that distinguishes it from the multimodal models from other frontier labs as far as I can tell.

Aside from how impressive the model is, the demos here are very well done! Quirky and short, unlike what we're used to from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Very cool! The demos felt fairly contrived - e.g., count things while I talk. I wonder what more commercial applications look like.

incredibly impressive demos. I wonder how the training data for these models look like?

is it separate batches of special "skills" that are added post training? how can they guarantee the models won't eventually lose a skill?

That's neat and definitely the next step. But to be honest, I don't want an AI talk to me like that.