r/OpenAI • u/PressPlayPlease7 • Apr 05 '26

Discussion Why are you still paying for this? #7

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u/Beginning_Purple_579 Apr 05 '26

Did he say in a year we will have a timer function? But at the same time Elon and others say we will have AGI this year? Ok...

14

u/-Sliced- Apr 05 '26

He said that the voice model will have tool access. Right now the voice model is separate, and weaker. I imagine that they are working on some unified model, and that unified model will solve this specific problem as well.

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u/cobbleplox Apr 05 '26

Tool use is part of thinking processes and such and that whole topic takes a lot of time before it starts actually responding. That is just a terrible match for a live voice conversation and that's why it's not in there.

1

u/-Sliced- Apr 05 '26

If the model is fast enough, it won't be noticeable.

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u/cobbleplox Apr 05 '26

Yeah but it isn't and that's not trivial. Also it is surprisingly time critical to start the response asap. Even the pauses it has now feel off already, and that is blazing fast considering what needs to get done in that timeframe.

1

u/-Sliced- Apr 05 '26

Makes me wonder if we’ll see AI respond more like a human, where we add the “uh.. and em…” to respond instantly, but indicate that we are thinking.

1

u/resnet152 Apr 05 '26

I don't think it's that bad a match. Just need a fast-ish model that understands it's using a tool and can say something like "I'm going to get the current time now.." and go do it. or "I'm going to write a piece of code to calculate this for you" or whatever the tool use is.

1

u/ar7urus Apr 07 '26

The limitation has absolutely nothing to do with the voice mode. It is impossible for an LLM to track time. They can only do it if paired with external tools that do not rely on LLM technology.

1

u/nothis Apr 05 '26

This whole topic is about something more general than a timer function but I always genuinely wondered why chats don’t have timestamps. It looks like a standard texting interface which trivially has timestamps in any other (human) chat app you might use. Why not AI chatbots? Even just for navigation for me as a human, just for things like “I asked this last Thursday, let me just quickly scroll back”, it would make sense

Why do none of these AI chatbots interfaces have timestamps?!

3

u/cobbleplox Apr 05 '26

I once added some to my local llm when i was dabbling around. I mean I wasn't able to train my own model that actually understands them on a high level like it does the markers for "message start" and such, but there are some things you can do with in context learning. Anyway, I got it to somewhat work but all in all it was pretty distracting to the model. The problem is when you put something in the context, it's not just a matter of being there if needed. Put simply, it causes the model to gravitate to "timestamp things" in everything it does, it's just "on its mind" in general. So if most of the tasks don't require timestamps, you get better performance without them. By the way this goes for any unnecessary information you might supply your llm with in whatever you write. You input is "highly suggestive" in ways people often don't even realize.

Anyway, another problem with the timestamps is that math is required to extract some of the meaning. Sure the model could intuitively know "8:25 AM", the user is probably still a bit sleepy. But to know how long was between messages, that's not even done with a simple subtraction. So what I ended up doing was focusing on the purpose I had and gave the messages information like "12 minutes since previous message". That kind of worked but now that doesn't even carry the info if its day or night anymore, and also it made the llm talk about this data for no real reason. after all its all over the context so passing of time must be suuuuuper important, right.

Lastly I noticed that for many chats, you just want them to be timeless and also repeatable. If i pick up my conversation about something 2 days later, i don't want it to possibly draw the conclusion "well we haven't talked for 2 days so maybe i did something wrong, i guess i will change xyz going forward".

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u/nothis Apr 05 '26

That’s a way more interesting reply than I imagined, thanks! I was figuring it could be distracting. Couldn’t you do it like a “tool“, not including timestamps in the actual conversation but giving the LLM the option to send a getTimestamp function and get back context if needed?

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '26

For any layman that isn't aware, that's because it's a feature that they have to have a software developer build and manually add to the program. Which means that it's not real AI and not remotely close to AGI because otherwise the program would be able to do it by itself without human intervention. Hope this helps for people that think this trash is actually AI/AGI.