Meta’s latest project is so dangerous that even it doesn’t want to release it

Welcome to 2023, also known as “The Age of AI”. Well, in all honesty, we’ve been in an age of AI for awhile now, as some of the best phones rock AI-fueled features. What we’re currently defining as “growth” is likely to be just the start of a super-boom, but still: the hype is real.

As it turns out, everyone has an AI project nowadays. ChatGPT showed its superior capabilities to immensely entertain the minds of several generations and it can even boost your productivity if you use it right! And that’s how the fad became fact. 

So it basically took no time at all for Microsoft and Google to rush out AI platforms of their own. Shocking, Samsung won’t be doing that — outside of its internal tool, but that drama was slightly different. But someone is missing.

Where’s Meta in all of this? Well, you asked just in time. The company unveiled its latest AI-fueled project and… refused to release it to the public? Like, not make a profit? 

Huh. Wow.

Okay, before we all continue with this series of shocked gasps, let’s elaborate on what the AI even does. Meta’s take differs from the text-based platforms we’ve become witness to thus far, as “Voicebox” is basically capable of generating speech.

Alright, cool, it does text-to-speech. Where’s the scary part? Well, according to Meta’s own research, the platform vastly outperforms other tools from the category. In fact, it is capable of going beyond what it has been trained to accomplish.

Whew, sounds like Meta saved us from an early AI-pocalypse.

But since it’s really fun to see how that might’ve turned out, let’s check on what Voicebox can do anyway. Currently, it is capable of reproducing accurate text-to-speech replication of a person’s voice in six European languages.

So, this may sound pretty harmless. But then the accuracy, precision and detail with which the AI platform executes the task become apparent. And it starts getting Goosebumps-y.

But still, the real surprise here doesn’t come from the fact that Voicebox is outperforming its programming. This was bound to happen sooner or later and Meta is part of Big Tech, so no shocks there. But the company’s choice to effectively not earn money from this platform is absolutely inspiring.

And while this won’t stop existing voice machines from almost-perfectly creating voice clips that sound eerily similar to prolific public figures and political actors, it still raises our faith in humanity just a bit. Before the eventual AI-pocalypse sequel comes, at least.