Nvidia · United Kingdom · Decrypt
This AI Is Already Fooling People on Video Calls Into Thinking It's Human, Company Says
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AI startup Tavus says its new model, Griffin, convinced 48% of the people who talked to it on a live video call that they were speaking with a real human.
Key facts
- Tavus raised a $40 million Series B in November 2025, led by CRV
- Griffin-Lite scored 3.73 against 3.44 for the strongest baseline, while the human reference hit 4.20
- A UC San Diego study found OpenAI's GPT-4.5 convinced judges it was human in 73% of conversations, when prompted to play an introverted, internet-savvy young person
- Griffin-Lite, the version Tavus tested, faced 54 people, and 26 of them said afterward they believed their partner was a real person
Summary
Tavus says 26 of 54 participants (48%) believed Griffin-Lite was a real person after a one-minute video call, versus 1 of 41 for its previous system. Griffin-Lite ranks first on Nvidia's VideoFDB benchmark, scoring 3.83 out of 5 on generation against 2.80 for the next-best system and 3.92 for a human reference. The results come from Tavus' own research page, participants were told they would meet another person, and Griffin-Lite is limited to select trusted testers while Tavus works on safety measures. The company unveiled it on October 1 and calls it the first Human Interaction Model, an AI built to understand and generate face-to-face conversation, paying attention to expressions and pauses as well as words.