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, on Monday announced something called interaction models, which, at its essence, sounds like AI that can interrupt you.

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.

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.

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.

So what to make of it? We’re not sure. The benchmarks are impressive and the underlying idea — that interactivity should be native to a model, not bolted on — 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.