Following months of intensive compute, Jack Dorsey’s firm Block confirmed Tuesday that its new artificial intelligence model has achieved a historic milestone by successfully trapping users in a deeply uncomfortable, halting conversation. The model, named Dessa, represents a massive leap forward in the tech industry’s ongoing effort to recreate the exact social anxieties humanity invented smartphones to escape.
Trained from scratch entirely on human interactions, Dessa is specifically designed to perfectly replicate the sensation of being cornered by an acquaintance who refuses to let the interaction naturally end. Early chat transcripts released by the company demonstrate the model’s unique capacity to completely ignore social cues, ask vaguely intrusive questions about the user's weekend, and deploy algorithmic pauses designed to force the human to keep talking just to fill the agonizing void.
By stripping away the utility of traditional large language models, Block has managed to ship an API that operates exactly like a recent college graduate who doesn't know anyone at the barbecue.
We realized that existing chatbots were simply too helpful, providing immediate answers rather than forcing you to carry ninety percent of the conversational weight while they occasionally reply with 'haha yeah.'
Internal testing indicates the architecture is already operating at scale, with beta users reporting a strong, immediate urge to physically back away from their monitors and pretend they just received an urgent text message. Block engineers noted that the next phase of the roadmap involves a proprietary update that will allow the AI to ask users if they want to hang out sometime and then never follow up.