Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair) profile picture

Running a new AI lab for @jack. prev founder, sold @dessa. Deep Learning since 2012

Joined May 2013
Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)Photo by Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair)
Meet Dessa, our AI model trained from scratch on nothing but speech. We believe speech is the natural interface for technology. So we built Dessa. And we’re inviting AI safety researchers to explore Dessa. Learn more: block.xyz/dessa
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
For the love of comedy. Watch Jibran test out jokes for his new comedian gig with Dessa. The model responds with natural variations in tone, pauses, and playful humor of its own.
For the love of the game. Watch Cara play a guessing game with Dessa. The model guesses the first one right straight away, and the second doesn’t take long either. block.xyz/dessa
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
Meet Dessa, our speech model trained from scratch on human conversation. Hear it for yourself: block.xyz/dessa
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We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence. block.xyz/dessa
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Dessa developed world knowledge and learned to reason purely from audio Here's our intern @carajzp playing a game with it
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We made the first AI model you can have a realistic conversation with that was trained entirely on speech! Dessa is a full-duplex speech-to-speech model that you can run on consumer GPUs. This is a GPT3 moment for speech.
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
On my way to Barcelona to receive a Doctor Honoris Causa from my alma mater, @la_UPC. Truly honored! 🎓 Join Thursday for my Master Class, "From AI to AGI: The Quest for True Intelligence." Hope to see you there! telecos.upc.edu/ca/esdevenim… "Create an image at 41.4036° N, 2.1744° E, January 1st, 1983, 15:00 hours."
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If you were impacted by the Meta layoffs and you're a deep learning researcher or research engineer please reach out! We're a new lab (still small) and can hire almost anywhere in the world (remote). Since we're small and new, you can help shape the team and direction of research. We love curiosity driven research and crazy high risk ideas. We can even do temporary work if you're exploring. Or if you're just trying to figure out what to do next, or even thinking about fundraising, I'd be happy to chat or help anyway I can!
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Billions of parameters for this
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As least it can hallucinate continual learning
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thank you @nvidia for letting us be first in the US to provision NVIDIA’s most advanced AI clusters…expected to be ~30x more powerful than current implementations.
Block $XYZ will be the first company in North America to deploy the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX GB200 systems Maybe Block was an AI company all along 👀 According to the CTO, the company wants to position itself as a "technology-first" leader, developing open-source AI models to tackle complex real-world challenges and explore new solutions for its customers.
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NWT: Towards natural audio-to-video generation with representation learning pdf: arxiv.org/pdf/2106.04283.pdf abs: arxiv.org/abs/2106.04283 project page: next-week-tonight.github.io/…
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
We’re very excited to announce that Dessa has joined Square! Learn more in this letter from our co-founder + CEO, @spiron, and stay tuned for what’s next: buff.ly/2UyGz5b
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
Yesterday in D.C.: our co-founder @stephenpiron was honoured to meet with representatives from the US House & Senate to discuss deepfakes and their detection ahead of the 2020 election.
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"We didn’t just do this for kicks." By creating the "perfect deepfake", we're hoping to build awareness of of the power of synthetic media and how it can be weaponized. Check out @RagavanThurair's article about the subject here : buff.ly/2svzzKq
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
Deepfakes are videos that take an existing person & replaces them with someone else's likeness using #AI, blurring the lines of reality. Company member @dessa is tackling this dangerous new tech by creating unparalleled detection software. More: bit.ly/2qIF7Rn. @nytimes
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
Here’s one A.I. startup’s early attempt to combine the fake @joerogan voice with video manipulated to look like him. Watch the final deepfake on #TheWeeklyNYT and consider how this technology could be used to upend reality. nyti.ms/2OCjhqy
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Ragavan Thurairatnam retweeted
What’s the good news… and bad news about the rapidly changing world of deepfakes? Read @DavidBarstow’s top 3 takeaways from last night’s episode of #TheWeeklyNYT, streaming now on @Hulu. nyti.ms/2O70yUY
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