Your next AI colleague watches, listens, and talks. All at once.
There is a new AI model in town. And this one shows us where things are heading.
It is called Interaction Models. It comes from Thinking Machines Lab, the company founded by Mira Murati, who was CTO at OpenAI. It is in research preview right now.
It’s not in your tools yet, but let’s have a look so that we understand what’s coming.
Full duplex.
That is the term they use. It means the model listens to you and talks to you at the same time. It can also watch you on video and comment in real time. It doesn’t wait for you to finish.
It jumps up and comments when it thinks it should.
My favourite demo is this one: The presenter tells the model: "I'm going to tell you a story, and whenever you hear an animal, count it out loud." Then she starts talking. The model doesn't wait. It counts out loud as she speaks. Deer. Sheep. Coyote. All while she goes on telling the story.
It sounds small. It is not small.
The current generation feels like a transcript interface with a voice wrapper.
You say something. You wait. It responds. Then you react. It is still turn-based, even when it sounds like a conversation.
It’s very smart. But it is not how humans interact.
This is different. Thinking Machines describes it as both of you thinking at the same time. Their demo videos show: an AI that jumps in when the woman at her desk slouches. An AI that interrupts the guy mid-sentence because it thinks the conversation is going the wrong way. An AI that notices when a friend walks into the room and says, "Friend."
It is processing video in real time, as you work.
How it works (if you are curious)
They use something called micro-turns. As the video or audio plays, the model processes and responds in tiny intervals. No waiting for a whole message before it reacts.
There are also two models working together. The interaction model stays with you, while the background model handles the reasoning. That is why it is so responsive. The heavy thinking happens in parallel.
So what does this mean for us?
A lot.
The obvious thing first: This changes how AI comes into our work. No longer a stop, prompt, read response loop. But as a real-time companion.
The current limitation is that context builds up really quickly with video and audio. That is a technical constraint they will figure out.
The more interesting thing is what this means for meetings and coworking. AI meeting assistants already exist. You can ask Fireflies a question mid-Zoom and it responds. But right now, by the time it replies, the conversation has already moved on. It comes back too slow to be useful.
With a model like this, AI will actually be part of the conversation. Contributing. Asking questions. Pointing things out. Coaching. All in real time.
And then there is the governance question.
We are already working through this with meeting transcripts. Who has access? Where are they stored? How long are they kept?
This is a different order of magnitude. An AI that watches your screen while you work. Sees the client file you have open. Hears the conversation in the room. Continuously.
The meeting assistant section of your AI policy is a starting point. It needs to broaden.
Your next steps
Go have a look at the videos at ThinkingMachines.ai. Just to plant the seed. You do not need to do anything else with this information right now. As the technologies converge, this will come into the models you are already using.
You will not be surprised, because you have already started thinking about it.
That is how we roll.
—
Inbal Rodnay
Guiding Firms in AI Adoption and Automation
Keynote speaker | AI Workshops | Executive briefings | The Tech Savvy Firm
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