Thinking Machines wants to create an AI system that actually listens while you speak

Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Moratti, on Monday announced something called Interaction modelswhich essentially sounds like an artificial intelligence that can interrupt you.

Right now, every AI model I’ve used works the same way. You talk, he listens. He responds, you listen. Thinking Machines is trying to change that by building a model that processes your input and generates a response at the same time, so that it’s more like a phone call than a text string.

The technical term for this is “full duplex,” and the company claims that its model, TML-Interaction-Small, responds in 0.40 seconds, which is roughly the speed of natural human conversation and much faster than similar models from OpenAI and Google.

However, this is just a research preview and not a product. The company has not released it to the public yet. It says a “limited research preview” will be coming in the next few months, with a broader release later this year.

So what do you do with it? We are not sure. the Standards Impressive and the basic idea – that interaction should be native to the model, not bolted on – is certainly interesting. Whether the real-world experience lives up to the technical claims is something we won’t know until people actually get to use it.