Morning Token 05
🔬 Research
Block's Dessa: an AI trained only on human conversation
Jack Dorsey's company Block announced Dessa, a conversation model. Block says it was trained from scratch on nothing but human conversation, meaning speech, not web text. It got 389 points on Hacker News.
To show it off, Block shared real chats with people. Some are a little awkward and uncanny, like talking to a shy new friend. Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam shared one of these exchanges.
It is early work, and it is not clear yet where people can use it. But it is a different path from the usual text-first chatbots.
Why it matters
Voice AI that sounds like real people could make assistants feel more natural. It also makes it harder to know if you are talking to a human, which matters for scams and trust.
