Hello. I made this. I'm a bit shocked at how many people are getting things wrong and taking things out of context, so perhaps I could answer some questions.

To clarify: I have not been with MIT in years. I was paid the minimum hourly rate (roughly $14 an hour) to work on a related project during my undergraduate years, which eventually evolved into this project years down the road. (In fact, I had to pay for my own compute to get my work started - MIT never offered me any credits.) Everything else has been paid out of pocket since then. Yes, it does indeed cost several thousands of dollars a month - that is not an exaggeration. This has been optimized so many times that the technology needs to improve first before I can cut down on costs.

The timer in the "TOS" was put there in hopes that people could understand where I was coming from in regards to misappropriating this kind of research. I did not expect people to get this riled up over a 10 second timer. (Especially not on Hacker News, of all places...)

Edit: I suppose it makes sense to include other information in this post so that others don't have to go hunting for my comments in this thread:

- >This is unrelated but what's with the fascination with HN users and My Little Pony? I've noticed this on a lot of posts in the past few months.

- Twilight Sparkle's voice is indispensable in getting emotional contextualizers to work properly. The logo and profile picture is an homage to that fact.

- >But seriously: how did you get the domain `15.ai`?

- I purchased it. It was definitely not cheap.

- >They named their tts "Deep Throat"? Why would you?

- It was a suggestion from a Twitter user, and I found it clever.

- >I heavily doubt it's "several thousands of dollars"...

- It is indeed several thousands of dollars a month. I can show you AWS invoices, if you're skeptical. Just send me an email and I'd be happy to show proof.

- >The disclaimer is a little ironic considering the site owner doesn’t own the model (MIT does) and doesn’t own the training data (the various shows and games do)

- I'm sorry to tell you that I do, in fact, own my own model. I have not been with MIT in years.

user:	15ai
created:	January 6, 2021
karma:	139
about:	I made 15.ai.