State Space Models and Real-time Intelligence with Karan Goel and Albert Gu from Cartesia

This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Karan Goel and Albert Gu from Cartesia. Karan and Albert first met as Stanford AI Lab PhDs, where their lab invented Space Models or SSMs, a fundamental new primitive for training large-scale foundation models. In 2023, they Founded Cartesia to build real-time intelligence for every device. One year later, Cartesia released Sonic which generates high quality and lifelike speech with a model latency of 135ms—the fastest for a model of this class.

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Show Notes: 

(0:00) Introduction

(0:28) Use Cases for Cartesia and Sonic 

(1:32) Karan Goel & Albert Gu’s professional backgrounds

(5:06) State Space Models (SSMs) versus Transformer Based Architectures 

(11:51) Domain Applications for Hybrid Approaches 

(13:10) Text to Speech and Voice

(17:29) Data, Size of Models and Efficiency 

(20:34) Recent Launch of Text to Speech Product

(25:01) Multimodality & Building Blocks

(25:54) What’s Next at Cartesia? 

(28:28) Latency in Text to Speech

(29:30) Choosing Research Problems Based on Aesthetic 

(31:23) Product Demo

(32:48) Cartesia Team & Hiring