> one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72
That’s around ~$4-6 million in hardware cost (one rack, 72 GPUs + accompanying hardware).
Many AI shops are funded well into tens of millions if not hundreds, for early rounds.
Also the team size is really small (< 10???). So yes, indie might be a stretch but still very impressive, relatively speaking.
Now taking the other side, they didn’t have to worry about hosting/billing/subscriptions or any of that yet. It’s a research demo at this point.
Perhaps boutique is a better term?
Also a speech to speech model it can't do any tool use or you can't guide it much am I mistaken? How will it be used for agentic uses is the part I don't get. Edit: this is response from Argon if anyone was also curious: You are not mistaken about Dessa: because it was trained solely on raw audio with zero text data, it cannot read text system prompts or output code for tool calls on its own. To use it as an agent, developers must either steer it purely through spoken voice instructions or pair it as a conversational "voice front-end" alongside a separate text LLM that listens to the audio and executes the tools in the background.