Eric Battenberg

Generative Models of Speech and Audio @GoogleDeepMind Frontier AI

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

Transformer-based TTS models sound great but have all kinds of reliability issues.

Our new model, Very Attentive Tacotron (VAT), is a Transformer-based TTS system that doesn't drop or repeat words and can generalize to any practical utterance length.

https://t.co/y3kCIYF8M5

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

@sedielem I honestly only know how to make an em dash in LaTeX.

[Fates Lover @fateslover]

@jbillinson Smartphones feel like the oddest collective delusion: everyone agrees excessive phone use is bad for them, everyone feels better without them, and we’ve structured all of modern life around using them constantly.

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

Idea for improving cold winters: Redefine the freezing point of water to be 10 C (50 F) during the winter months. Instant temperature increase when we need it most. We'll call it "Warmth Saving Temperature." 🥶🌡️☀️ @SaveStandard

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

Make solar noon noon again! @SaveStandard

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

@GodGunsGainz @hubermanlab That extra evening daylight is being introduced gradually over the next month and then you'll have 6+ months of it. Naturally, without manipulating the clock.

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

[American Academy of Sleep Medicine @AASMorg]

Today, clocks across the country spring forward — and with that single hour comes a cascade of consequences most people don't see. ⏰

Research links the DST transition to increased rates of heart attack, stroke, traffic fatalities, and mental health crises in the days that follow.

Swipe through to understand why leading sleep and medical organizations, including the AASM, are calling for a permanent end to the clock change — and why Standard Time is the science-backed solution.

Learn more here. 👉 https://t.co/8uHXXN3nnK

#DitchDST #DaylightSavingTime #SpringForward #SleepHealth #StandardTime

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

@SenRickScott There's no such thing as getting an extra hour of sunshine by changing the clock. Please confer with sleep and circadian rhythm experts on this topic.

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

Most of the article is about how bad DST is for our health and wellbeing.

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

My prediction is that BC will repeal this after 1 year just like the US did when they tried it in the 70's.
https://t.co/dvJibnQW4T

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

Vancouver will be dealing with 9am sunrises in the winter. That's brutal.

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

@LukeSampe Traveling to the next time zone over changes the clock but also changes your location relative to the sun (so 6am comes around earlier but so does the sun rise, so your circadian rhythm adjusts). With DST, you only get the former, and therefore permanent jet lag.

[Jonathan Moore @JMooreofKY]

There is no need to go through the stupidest ritual of modern life next weekend. More daylight is coming this month without the foolishness of changing our clocks. @SaveStandard Time!

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

Major new report on global trends in mental health, out today from Sapien Labs. Data from 2.5 million people across 85 countries.

Some of the most important findings:

1) Young adults used to generally have good mental health, compared to older generations. But now, in ALL countries examined, they are doing badly compared to older generations in that country.

2) "Four key factors have emerged that together predict three quarters of this effect. These are diminished
family bonds, diminished spirituality, smartphones at increasingly young age, and increasing consumption of
ultra-processed food."

3) The decline of young people's mental health is "most pronounced in the wealthier and more developed countries." They note that it is in such countries that smartphones are given earliest, junk food is most heavily consumed, spirituality is most diminished, and family ties are looser and often weaker.

4) "A younger age of first smartphone ownership is associated with increased suicidal thoughts,
aggression, and other problems in adulthood."

5) Here is their summary of findings on early smartphone ownership:

"GenZ is the first generation to grow up with a smartphone. Among this group, the younger they acquired their first smartphone in childhood, the more likely they are to have struggles as adults. These struggles extend beyond sadness and anxiety to less discussed symptoms, such as a sense of being detached from reality, suicidal thoughts, and aggression towards others. The effects arise through disruption of sleep, increased risk of exposure to harmful online content, predators, and explicit material as well as increased probabilities of cyberbullying during crucial developmental years. Excessive time spent on smartphones also diminishes the development of social cognition that requires learned interpretation of facial expressions, body language, and group dynamics. The negative impacts are particularly sharp below age 13."

The report is short, accessible, and important. Read it here:

https://t.co/hFGAyoWabs

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

There are now so many RCTs showing the mental health benefits of reducing social media use for at least a week.

Here's a new one showing that young adults get LESS lonely when they reduce, even though their friends are not reducing. From Gary Goldfield et al.
https://t.co/mVpYsevOZj
Social media does not give teens real community; it prevents them from spending time with real people.

And, of course, Meta itself did an RCT, with similar results:
https://t.co/Nv14Y2n2kH

Imagine how much loneliness would drop if an entire school, or community, or an entire generation, reduced or quit at the same time.

Better yet, imagine how much less lonely, anxious, and depressed young people would be if social media was never invented, or if there had been an age limit of 16 when they were 10, so they did not all go through puberty spending 5 hours a day swiping and comparing, instead of hanging out with friends.

Meta is facing survivor parents and a jury for the first time in its history this week, in Los Angeles. It will argue that the data is all correlational, and that nobody can prove causation. They have been saying this for years and it is demonstrably false. There are so many different lines of evidence demonstrating causation. Zach Rausch and I lay out seven lines of evidence here:
https://t.co/e2ifxADjd9

My two favorites, after the RCTs: Teens themselves say it has harmed their mental health, and employees of Meta, Snap, and TikTok discuss the many harms that their products cause, in emails and internal reports that leaked or were discovered. They know that they are harming children at an industrial scale.

This is why so many countries around the world are now following Australia's bold move and raising the age for opening accounts to 16. 2026 will be a big year of change in the battle to reclaim childhood from big tech.

[Eric Battenberg @EricBattenberg]

Julian is hosting a student researcher on our team. He's a great host, so if this textless audio generation project sounds like it's up your alley, fill out the form linked in his thread.

[Julian Salazar @JulianSlzr]

Hiring a Student Researcher @GoogleDeepMind to develop new methods for speech & audio LMs in Mountain View, California!🔈🌊🌊🌊

If you want to tackle coherent, long-form generative audio modeling in a textless / continuous / raw / latent / variable-rate /🤔 way... 🧵

[RJ Skerry-Ryan @rustyryan]

My team in GDM Frontier AI is hiring (Mountain View). If you're a researcher interested full duplex modeling, multimodal LLMs (Gemini), modality gap, joint speech/text modeling, PGMs, streamable generative models, and representation learning for language modeling -- DM me!

[Raymond D Woods Jr @RaymondDWoodsJr]

Let's set the clocks back to Standard Time on Sunday morning and leave them there in the spring.

I believe most people will be surprised to find that, as the days naturally "get longer" as we move away from the winter solstice toward the "longest day of the year", the summer solstice, there will be ample daylight in the evenings when it is warm enough to enjoy it.

There will also be ample sunlight in the mornings in winter as people begin their day.

Standard Time is a good balance between morning sunlight and evening sunlight and is more closely aligned to the sun.

Let's give it a try!

@SaveStandard
#DitchDST

[Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab]

This is the key visual. Locking the clock is better than switching twice a year. Whether you prefer standard or daylight savings is perhaps a matter of personal preference but the data on mental health in adults and kids say standard is better.

[david 🌻 @realdavidonline]

Huge outage crashes many of the world’s biggest apps.

Multiple servers are down including Snapchat, Amazon & Alexa, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite, Robinhood, Coinbase, Venmo, etc.