Thinking Machines wants to build an AI that actually listens while it talks

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI ​​startup founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, announced on Monday something called interaction modelswhich essentially sounds like AI that can interrupt you.

At this point, every AI model you’ve ever used works the same way. You talk, it listens. It responds, you listen. Thinking Machines is trying to change that by building a model that processes your input while generating a response, so it’s more like a phone call than a text message chain.

The technical term for this is ‘full duplex’ and the company claims its model, TML-Interaction-Small, responds in 0.40 seconds, which is about the speed of a natural human conversation and significantly faster than comparable models from OpenAI and Google.

Yet this is a research example, not a product. The company is not making it public yet. A “limited research preview” will come in the coming months, it says, with a wider release set for later this year.

So what should you think? We’re not sure. The benchmarks are impressive and the underlying idea – that interactivity should be inherent to a model – is definitely interesting. We won’t know whether real-world experience lives up to the technical claims until people can actually use it.