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

<p id="speakable-summary" class="wp-block-paragraph">Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, on Monday announced something called <a href="https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">interaction models</a>, which, at its essence, sounds like AI that can interrupt you.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Right now, 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 and generates a response at the same time, so it’s more like a phone call than a text chain.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">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.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Still, this is a research preview, not a product. The company isn’t releasing it to the public yet. A “limited research preview” is coming in the next few months, it says, with a wider release set for later this year.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So what to make of it? We’re not sure. The <a href="https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/#benchmarks" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">benchmarks</a> are impressive and the underlying idea — that interactivity should be native to a model — is definitely interesting. Whether the real-world experience lives up to the technical claims is something we won’t know until people can actually use it.</p>