Authorities in Virginia are investigating the cause of a house explosion and fire that killed one firefighter, injured 10 others and leveled a home in a Washington, D.C., suburb.

Audio samples for the paper “BASE TTS: Lessons from building a billion-parameter text-to-speech model on 100K hours of data”

Abstract: We introduce a text-to-speech (TTS) model called BASE TTS, which stands for Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities. BASE TTS is the largest TTS model to-date, trained on 100K hours of public domain speech data, achieving a new state-of-the-art in speech naturalness. It deploys a 1-billion-parameter autoregressive Transformer that converts raw texts into discrete codes (“speechcodes”) followed by a convolution-based decoder which converts these speechcodes into waveforms in an incremental, streamable manner. Further, our speechcodes are built using a novel speech tokenization technique that features speaker ID disentanglement and compression with byte-pair encoding. Echoing the widely-reported “emergent abilities” of large language models when trained on increasing volume of data, we show that BASE TTS variants built with 10K+ hours and 500M+ parameters begin to demonstrate natural prosody on textually complex sentences.

Limerence is a state of mind that prevents genuine connections by prioritizing an idealized fantasy relationship over reality, and letting go of limerence requires taking responsibility, understanding fantasies, and finding real connections.

Questions to inspire discussion.

What is limerence?
—Limerence is a state of mind characterized by obsessive thoughts and fantasies about someone, prioritizing a fantasy relationship with them in one’s head over the real relationship.

The first Hyundai plant dedicated to building EVs and batteries in the US will be open as soon as this October. According to Hyundai Motor America CEO Jose Munoz, the brand is “pulling ahead” to gain eligibility for the $7,500 EV tax credit.

Hyundai began construction on its massive $7.6 billion EV megaplant in Georgia in October 2022. A year later, the company announced that 99.9% of the foundation work was complete as it fast-tracked construction.

The site “is advancing ever day,’” according to Oscar Kwon CEO of the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America (HMGMA).

Apple Vision Pro is the third Apple product to use a Digital Crown. Apple Watch originally introduced the dial input method before AirPods Max adapted it as a volume knob. Now the Digital Crown is taking on its third life as one of two physical controls on Apple Vision Pro. Here’s everything you can do with the Digital Crown and top button on Apple Vision Pro.

Open Home View

Press the Digital Crown.