Transformer-based TTS models sound great but have all kinds of reliability issues. Our new model, Very Attentive Tacotron (VAT), is a Transformer-based TTS system that doesn't drop or repeat words and can generalize to any practical utterance length. arxiv.org/abs/2410.22179

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

Smartphones feel like the oddest collective delusion: everyone agrees excessive phone use is bad for them, everyone feels better without them, and we’ve structured all of modern life around using them constantly.

Idea for improving cold winters: Redefine the freezing point of water to be 10 C (50 F) during the winter months. Instant temperature increase when we need it most. We'll call it "Warmth Saving Temperature." 🥶🌡️☀️ @SaveStandard

Make solar noon noon again! @SaveStandard

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

Vancouver will be dealing with 9am sunrises in the winter. That's brutal.

There is no need to go through the stupidest ritual of modern life next weekend. More daylight is coming this month without the foolishness of changing our clocks. @SaveStandard Time!

RT @JonHaidt: Major new report on global trends in mental health, out today from Sapien Labs. Data from 2.5 million people across 85 countr…

There are now so many RCTs showing the mental health benefits of reducing social media use for at least a week. Here's a new one showing that young adults get LESS lonely when they reduce, even though their friends are not reducing. From Gary Goldfield et al. sciencedirect.com/science/ar… Social media does not give teens real community; it prevents them from spending time with real people. And, of course, Meta itself did an RCT, with similar results: metasinternalresearch.org/ Imagine how much loneliness would drop if an entire school, or community, or an entire generation, reduced or quit at the same time. Better yet, imagine how much less lonely, anxious, and depressed young people would be if social media was never invented, or if there had been an age limit of 16 when they were 10, so they did not all go through puberty spending 5 hours a day swiping and comparing, instead of hanging out with friends. Meta is facing survivor parents and a jury for the first time in its history this week, in Los Angeles. It will argue that the data is all correlational, and that nobody can prove causation. They have been saying this for years and it is demonstrably false. There are so many different lines of evidence demonstrating causation. Zach Rausch and I lay out seven lines of evidence here: osf.io/xsje9/files/hmf8e My two favorites, after the RCTs: Teens themselves say it has harmed their mental health, and employees of Meta, Snap, and TikTok discuss the many harms that their products cause, in emails and internal reports that leaked or were discovered. They know that they are harming children at an industrial scale. This is why so many countries around the world are now following Australia's bold move and raising the age for opening accounts to 16. 2026 will be a big year of change in the battle to reclaim childhood from big tech.

Julian is hosting a student researcher on our team. He's a great host, so if this textless audio generation project sounds like it's up your alley, fill out the form linked in his thread.

My team in GDM Frontier AI is hiring (Mountain View). If you're a researcher interested full duplex modeling, multimodal LLMs (Gemini), modality gap, joint speech/text modeling, PGMs, streamable generative models, and representation learning for language modeling -- DM me!

Let's set the clocks back to Standard Time on Sunday morning and leave them there in the spring. I believe most people will be surprised to find that, as the days naturally "get longer" as we move away from the winter solstice toward the "longest day of the year", the summer solstice, there will be ample daylight in the evenings when it is warm enough to enjoy it. There will also be ample sunlight in the mornings in winter as people begin their day. Standard Time is a good balance between morning sunlight and evening sunlight and is more closely aligned to the sun. Let's give it a try! @SaveStandard #DitchDST

This is the key visual. Locking the clock is better than switching twice a year. Whether you prefer standard or daylight savings is perhaps a matter of personal preference but the data on mental health in adults and kids say standard is better.

Huge outage crashes many of the world’s biggest apps. Multiple servers are down including Snapchat, Amazon & Alexa, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite, Robinhood, Coinbase, Venmo, etc.

If you know the pain of sequence training<->inference, visit the #ICML25 Google booth 3-3:30 today (Tue.)! SequenceLayers is not just a layer library, but a new approach to defining and composing sequence architectures. Try it in Colab: colab.research.google.com/gi… See our report:

Today, Julian Salazar presents SequenceLayers, a framework-agnostic layer API & open-source library for creation of robust, streamable sequence models. Stop by the #ICML2025 Google booth at 3pm to learn about its design principles & JAX implementation. github.com/google/sequence-l… Tech Report: github.com/google/sequence-l… Code: github.com/google/sequence-l… PyPI package: sequence-layers

Most people never fully adjust to Daylight Saving Time—they just sleep less. Restore permanent Standard Time for better alignment with circadian rhythms and healthy sleep!

Regarding the debate about eliminating Daylight Savings Time ... Back in the 70s we tried ending Standard Time (what we are currently in), not Daylight Savings Time (summer time). I've seen that confused a bunch already. This time around, if I'm reading things right, we are proposing to eliminate DST and stick with standard time year-round. Meaning we will fall-back in Novemeber and stay there. Standard Time is what we were on before the World Wars and is what most of the world uses that doesn't observe the twice annual 1-hour clock adjustment. Also, Hawaii and Arizona observe permanent standard time as well. Neither of those states does the annual "spring forward". Standard time is synchronized with solar noon meaning at noon, the sun is directly overhead in most of the time zone. This varies a bit based on how north/south/east or west you are of the middle of the time zone though. That variance is unavoidable in any scenario without the time zones getting divided more granularly than the current 1-hour increments. While opinions on this are going to vary widely, I'm on the side of staying with Standard time year-round so that our clocks match the sun. Summer days will still be long and winter days will still be short. Shifting the clock around doesn't really change that. The clock should be constant and synchronized with the sun, no reason to be changing it twice a year. Society should adjust around the clock regionally when needed if daylight is a concern for certain activities. @SaveStandard @elonmusk @realDonaldTrump