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The Walkie-Talkie Era Is Over
In telecommunications, full-duplex describes a channel where both parties transmit and receive simultaneously. A phone call. In contrast, half-duplex is a walkie-talkie — one speaks, the other waits, someone says "over." Every AI product built between 2022 and 2026 was, at its core, a very sophisticated walkie-talkie. Mira Murati, formerly CTO of OpenAI, is betting the entire frontier missed this. Her new lab, Thinking Machines, released an architecture in May 2026 that processes continuous audio, video, and text in 200-millisecond micro-turns — perceiving you even while it responds to you. No turn boundary. No "over." For the first time, the AI is actually present. The design implications are larger than anyone in our industry is prepared for.
