Versus Look Up Trending Now Safety Net Say More Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects Getting Technical with Mashable Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag Mashable @Home All Series Block's latest AI model Dessa was trained entirely on human speech -- and it shows Jack Dorsey and Block, Inc. just took us one step closer to the singularity and it's simultaneously awesome and terrifying. If interacting with Siri has been the extent of your experience talking to AI, you're in for a rude awakening. While Apple's voice assistant often fumbles basic commands and can take an unnaturally long time to process a request, the latest and greatest AI models are moving closer and closer to natural human speech. Case in point: Dessa, the brainchild of Jack Dorsey's Block, is allegedly the world's first full-duplex speech model, meaning it can listen to you speak simultaneously, much like a real human does in the flow of normal conversation. In fact, that's Dessa's draw: it was trained entirely on human speech to make it as natural-sounding as possible.

This week, Dessa launched Atlas as an open source platform for developing deep learning projects. The deep learning startup Dessa was acquired by Square in February 2020. Let's see what features this beta version of their deep learning platform has to offer. Atlas has a Python SDK, CLI, GUI and scheduler on board. These aspects should help reduce the effort of managing infrastructure and increase the speed of developing deep learning models.

A deepfake video featuring an actor made to look and sound like the comedian Joe Rogan surfaced last week, stunning for its audio and visual accuracy. And Rogan was a great choice: He's put out hundreds of hours-long video podcasts. There is a lot of material to work with. If you're not yet aware of what a deepfake is in the first place, it's a way of using artificial intelligence to create fraudulent audio or video that sounds and/or looks like a particular person. In this case, we're seeing a fake video of Rogan saying things he never said.

Any business in its right mind should be painfully aware of how much money they could bleed via skillful Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, where fraudsters convincingly forge emails, invoices, contracts and letters to socially engineer the people who hold the purse strings. And any human in their right mind should be at least a little freaked out by how easy it now is to churn out convincing deepfake videos – including, say, of you, cast in an adult movie, or of your CEO saying things that… well, they would simply never say. Well, welcome to a hybrid version of those hoodwinks: deepfake audio, which was recently used in what's considered to be the first known case of an AI-generated voice of a CEO to bilk a UK-based energy firm out of €220,000 (USD $243,000). The Wall Street Journal reports that some time in March, the British CEO thought he had gotten a call from the CEO of his business's parent company, which is based in Germany. Whoever placed the call sounded legitimate.

A recent Wall Street Journal report has highlighted how, in March this year, a group of hackers were able to use AI software to mimic an energy company CEO's voice in order to steal £201,000. Reports indicate that the CEO of an unnamed UK-based energy company received a phone call from someone that he believed to be the German chief executive of the parent company. The person on the end of the phone ordered the CEO of the UK-based energy company to immediately transfer €220,000 (£201,000) into the bank account of a Hungarian supplier. The voice was reported to have been so accurate in its sound, that the CEO of the energy company even recognised what he thought was the subtleties of the German accent of his boss, and even "melody" of the accent. The call was so convincing that the energy company made the transfer of funds as requested.

Anonymous hacker programmer uses a laptop to hack the system in the dark. Phone scams are nothing new, but the mark usually isn't an accomplished CEO. According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the CEO of an unnamed UK-based energy firm believed he was on the phone with his boss, the chief executive of firm's the German parent company, when he followed the orders to immediately transfer €220,000 (approx. In fact, the voice belonged to a fraudster using AI voice technology to spoof the German chief executive. Rüdiger Kirsch of Euler Hermes Group SA, the firm's insurance company, shared the information with WSJ. He explained that the CEO recognized the subtle German accent in his boss's voice--and moreover that it carried the man's "melody."

In the first known case of successful financial scamming via audio deep fakes, cybercrooks were able to create a near-perfect impersonation of a chief executive's voice – and then used the audio to fool his company into transferring $243,000 to their bank account. A deep fake is a plausible video or audio impersonation of someone, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Security experts say that the incident, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, sets a dangerous precedent. "In the identity-verification industry, we're seeing more and more artificial intelligence-based identity fraud than ever before," David Thomas, CEO of identity verification company Evident, told Threatpost. "As a business, it's no longer enough to just trust that someone is who they say they are. Individuals and businesses are just now beginning to understand how important identity verification is. Especially in the new era of deep fakes, it's no longer just enough to trust a phone call or a video file."

A new startup has created an artificial intelligence system capable of mimicking voices that are unprecedentedly close to the real thing. In a video from Dessa, an AI company staffed by former employees of Google, IBM, and Microsoft, multiple audio clips demonstrate a machine-learning software that parrots the voice of popular podcaster, Joe Rogan to a degree that's almost indiscernible from the real thing. In the clips, the computer-generated Rogan muses on topics like chimpanzee's who can play hockey; it pulls off some adept tongue-twisters; and it even pontificates theories about how we're all living in a simulation, which as noted by The Verge, are some of Rogan's favorite topics. Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in the world, giving AI plenty of data to choose from when trying to mimic the host's voice In a response, even Rogan himself called the demonstration'terrifyingly accurate' reports CNET. What makes the demonstration more intriguing, or perhaps scary, according to Dessa is that software like the one demonstrated channeling Rogan could soon be commonplace.