Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend
Jay Peters 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 Supermanfilms), a person telling Dessa about taking...
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