Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model

AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text and audio inputs, according to Sesame’s description on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. RVQ refers to “residual vector quantization,” a technique for encoding audio into discrete tokens called codes. RVQ is used in a number of recent AI audio technologies, including Google’s SoundStream and Meta’s Encodec. CSM-1B uses a model from Meta’s Llama family as its backbone paired with an audio “decoder” component. A fine-tuned variant of CSM powers Maya, Sesame says. “The model open-sourced here is a base generation model,” Sesame writes in CSM-1B’s Hugging Face and GitHub repositories. “It is capable of producing a var ... Read full article.