Richard He

Over the past year I’ve been really interested in how people and AI will actually work together as the models keep getting better. We started with voice, because talking is the most natural way people work with each other.

A lot of full-duplex voice models came out in the last few weeks and they sound amazing. Building one from scratch takes a lot of data and a lot of money though. We had a small team and a fixed budget on this research project, so we had to find another way.

What we ended up with is a way to take an existing half-duplex speech LLM and turn it into a full-duplex one that can listen and speak at the same time, by training just a small LoRA on top of it. Today we’re open-sourcing it as Awaken

I think there's now a distinction between 'what agents can't do' and 'what humans can do better.' We used to assume that whatever an agent can't do, a human expert could probably do better.

As we hand more work to agents, what's left for humans to decide that actually produces better outcomes than the agent alone?

Turns out the easiest agent-to-agent protocol is a shared google doc. just linked my Grok Bot with Claude, they trade notes there every morning. works way better than I expected!

I kept hearing the same thing lately, “just let Opus/Astra decide, its call is usually better than mine,” a big shift from giving it tasks to giving up the decision power