bcherry

this really reminds me of the "worst volume control" from reddit https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world...

you mention voice ai in the announcement but I wonder how this works in practice. most voice AI systems are bound not by full response latency but just by time-to-first-non-reasoning-token (because once it heads to TTS, the output speed is capped at the speed of speech and even the slowest models are generating tokens faster than that once they start going).

what do ttft numbers look like for mercury 2? I can see how at least compared to other reasoning models it could improve things quite a bit but i'm wondering if it really makes reasoning viable in voice given it seems total latency is still in single digit seconds, not hundreds of milliseconds

This isn't really the author's point, but I think one effect of AI and the forthcoming robotics revolution will be the unrolling of a lot of consolidated supply chains for all sorts of products. It could usher in a renewed era of bespoke products.

For instance, when the cost of building a new (good) app goes to zero, it becomes economical to make a great app for a narrow niche, with a skeleton staff (maybe just one) and no VC money. And this can happen thousands of times over.

Robotics could open up bespoke local supply chains even beyond what's possible with a 3D printer today. For instance, if you had an actually dextrous humanoid robot "living" in your home, why wouldn't you have it just make all of your clothes? You could have any fabric, any style, exactly the right size. And only for the cost of materials (assuming you already own or lease the robot itself).

I do think the author is right in the big picture - the future will be more fun.

wow thanks for leaving this comment - i now realize two things:

1. the farmer's almanac i thought of when i saw the title and even read the article is not going anywhere 2. i have never before heard of the farmer's almanac referred to in this notice

they'd have to be extra careful with cpython, it's got a lot of include

yeah i think they shot themselves in the foot a bit here by creating the o series. the truth is that GPT-5 _is_ a huge step forward, for the "GPT-x" models. The current GPT-x model was basically still 4o, with 4.1 available in some capacity. GPT-5 vs GPT-4o looks like a massive upgrade.

But it's only an incremental improvement over the existing o line. So people feel like the improvement from the current OpenAI SoTA isn't there to justify a whole bump. They probably should have just called o1 GPT-5 last year.

"The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."

- Michelangelo

Chat is a great UX _around_ development tools. Imagine having a pair programmer and never being allowed to speak to them. You could only communicate by taking over the keyboard and editing the code. You'd never get anything done.

Chat is an awesome powerup for any serious tool you already have, so long as the entity on the other side of the chat has the agency to actually manipulate the tool alongside you as well.

a little glossed over, but they do point out that most important improvement o1 has over gpt-4o is not it's "correct" score improving from 38% to 42% but actually it's "not attempted" going from 1% to 9%. The improvement is even more stark for o1-mini vs gpt-4o-mini: 1% to 28%.

They don't really describe what "success" would look like but it seems to me like the primary goal is to minimize "incorrect", rather than to maximize "correct". the mini models would get there by maximizing "not attempted" with the larger models having much higher "correct". Then both model sizes could hopefully reach 90%+ "correct" when given access to external lookup tools.

disagree - good products meet their users where they are and bury complexity under the hood. i can't imagine trying to use a calendar app (or any app really) that refuses to operate in any mode other than UTC.

It's kind of interesting because I think most people implementing RAG aren't even thinking about tokenization at all. They're thinking about embeddings:

1. chunk the corpus of data (various strategies but they're all somewhat intuitive)

2. compute embedding for each chunk

3. generate search query/queries

4. compute embedding for each query

5. rank corpus chunks by distance to query (vector search)

6. construct return values (e.g chunk + surrounding context, or whole doc, etc)

So this article really gets at the importance of a hidden, relatively mundane-feeling, operation that occurs which can have an outsized impact on the performance of the system. I do wish it had more concrete recommendations in the last section and code sample of a robust project with normalization, fine-tuning, and eval.

hey sorry about that - ran into a snag with the API but we got it back online an hour ago! hope you get another chance to take a look! reply

hey sorry about that - ran into a snag with the API but we got it back online an hour ago! hope you get another chance to take a look!

this one was actually so much fun I built it into the defaults https://playground.livekit.io/?preset=doom

It sure can

https://playground.livekit.io/?preset=0tfwypgx7&instructions...

yes and you can use it in text-text mode if you want. a key benefit is for turn-based usages (where you have running back and forth between user and assistant) you only need to send the incremental new input message for each generation. this is better than "prompt caching" on the chat completions API, which is basically a pricing optimization, as it's actually a technical advantage that uses less upstream bandwidth.

correct - you should also be able to save a lot by skipping their built-in VAD and doing turn detection (if you need it) locally to avoid paying for silent inputs.

keep in mind that this is just v1 of the realtime api. they'll add realtime vision/video down the road which can also have wide applications beyond synchronous communication.

yes it transcribes inputs automatically, but not in realtime.

outputs are sent in text + audio but you'll get the text very quickly and audio a bit slower, and of course the audio takes time to play back. the text also doesn't currently have timing cues so its up to you if you want to try to play it "in sync". if the user interrupts the audio, you need to send back a truncation event so it can roll its own context back, and if you never presented the text to the user you'll need to truncate it there as well to ensure your storage isn't polluted with fragments the user never heard.

No, it's the same thing as ChatGPT advanced voice. Full speech-to-speech model.

LiveKit, Cartesia, Deepgram, and Vercel

there's a difference between "click bait" (a misleading title specifically crafted to drive instinctual interest but which is not an accurate summation of the content) and titles accurately describing something truly interesting or surprising with more details inside. This is a case of the latter

(and whatever the opposite of "click bait" is, that's how I'd describe the original title!)

I wonder if they're allowed at SFO?

"net income" may be a bit simplistic for the moment, but agreed that it doesn't need to be twice as good. it simply needs to be the best. just because the marginal value of adding people goes down, doesn't mean you shouldn't keep adding them.

it's inconsistent. when i set it up on friday and used it over the weekend, i couldn't read the text on my iphone or the keys on my keyboard. i'm using it at work right now, and have no problem - it's extremely sharp. not sure what the variable is - but hopefully something they can improve.

analyst estimates are that they sold about 160,000 units through preorders. At $3500 per unit, that's $560M.

I agree that I/O has always been confusing and non-intuitive. O stands for "On"? For "Off"? I means eyes-shut? O means eyes open?

The new symbols aren't any better but the UX of "push this button to turn on or off" combined with obvious lights/etc when something is on has mostly made the semantic meaning of the symbols obsolete to 99% of consumers.

I suspect the truth (if this claim is true) is a lot more nuanced than "it did grade-school math", and there's more context surrounding this claim which insiders have and makes it much more interesting.

You don't need to accept their definition, neither does anyone else. But they do need to have a definition that they accept themselves, because it's used throughout their charter.

https://openai.com/charter

Maybe the other three weren't thrilled with Sam, and hadn't been for some time, but were just three of six so they didn't have the votes and weren't planning to press the issue until Ilya brought it up. With Sam and Greg gone, they are now three of four and even if they don't feel strongly that Sam was the wrong choice they may find it unappealing to vote to bring him back, and in fact it would take at least two of them changing their minds to vote with Ilya.