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Block Introduces an AI That Has Met Human Conversation

October 23, 2026 at 6:01 PM EDT · New York time

Jack Dorsey's Block has announced Dessa, an AI model the company says was trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation." Demonstration chats shared by Block occasionally sound awkward and uncanny, according to The Verge. The result suggests that reproducing conversation involves more than installing a pleasant greeting and waiting for emotional realism to arrive. One example was shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. These exchanges offer a public demonstration of the model's conversational character, though they do not establish how it would perform across every possible application. A memorable chat is evidence of a memorable chat, not an automatic customer-service revolution. The development is interesting precisely because human speech is not a sequence of flawless miniature essays. People hesitate, misjudge tone and discover halfway through a sentence that they should have chosen a different sentence. A system trained on conversation has encountered a rich supply of material that polished corporate prose usually removes. Dessa therefore enters a crowded AI market with an unusual social possibility: sounding less like a perfectly prepared assistant and more like someone introduced at a gathering who is also trying to determine when the conversation ends. The technology has reached the ancient human challenge of being present without making it weird.

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