Amazon's massive new speech model shows 'emergent' abilities
Amazon researchers just unveiled BASE TTS, a 980M-parameter speech model trained on 100,000 hours of public audio that exhibits LLM-like emergent behaviors. Scaling the model allowed it to naturally master tricky tasks like emotional inflection, whispered dialogue, and complex syntax without explicit fine-tuning. Why it matters: Text-to-speech may finally be escaping the uncanny valley, though Amazon is keeping the weights under wraps for safety.