LLMs need an insane amount of text. Dessa learned language from hundreds of times fewer words (in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is).

And it had to learn far more than language. Accents, pauses, breathing, sarcasm, humor, inflection, emotion, when to cut in: every one changes what someone means. Say “I didn’t say she stole my CUDA code” out loud, stressing a different word each time. Same words, different meaning every time.

Dessa is Block's speech-to-speech model, trained on human conversation alone - no text, no pretrained models via x.com