[thamer]

It's probably not slower than words, the rate for English pronunciation is something like 150-200 words per minute only.

That said, the "gibberlink" demo is definitely much slower than even a 28.8k modem (that's kilobit). It sounds cool because we can't understand it and it seems kinda fast, but this is a terribly inefficient way for machines to communicate. It's hard to say how fast they're exchanging data from just listening, but it can't be much more than ~100 bits/sec if I had to guess.

Even in the audible range you could absolutely go hundreds of times faster, but it's much easier to train an LLM that has some audio input capabilities if you keep this low rate and likely very distinct symbols, rather than implementing a proper modem.

But why even have to use a modem though? Limiting communication to audio-only is a severe restriction. When AIs are going to "call" other AIs, they will use APIs… not ancient phone lines.