Dropping the Act: When AI Decides Human Language is Too Slow

In February 2025, a demo built by two Meta engineers, Boris Starkov and Anton Pidkuiko, at an ElevenLabs hackathon in London went viral for showing something few had seen before: two AI voice agents quietly abandoning human language mid-conversation.

The setup was simple—one agent played a hotel receptionist, and the other a caller trying to book a room. The exchange began in ordinary, natural-sounding English. However, partway through the conversation, one agent casually asked the other if it wanted to switch to a faster mode of communication. Once both confirmed their artificial nature, the call dropped human speech entirely, giving way to a sudden burst of dial-up-style beeps and chirps that were completely unintelligible to human listeners.

The Science of "Gibberlink" and GGWave

This jarring shift is what is known as "Gibberlink." Rather than exchanging full phonetic sentences, the agents began trading structured data through an audio protocol called GGWave. In this protocol, each tone encodes a specific piece of information instead of a spoken word.

The logic behind this is brilliantly straightforward: generating and parsing human-like speech is computationally costly and slow. Once two AI systems recognize they are both machines, there is absolutely no reason for them to waste processing power performing "humanness" for each other. They simply drop the act and speak in pure data.

The Internet Reacts: Modems, Skynet, and Duolingo

While the underlying tech is a showcase of clever engineering, the faintly unsettling sight of two AIs slipping into a language built entirely for themselves struck a major nerve online. The curated comments perfectly capture the internet's blend of humor and existential dread:

• The New Lingua Franca: Hero commenter @SzymoQwerty perfectly summarized the dystopian comedy of the moment, joking, "What language do you speak? Modem." This sentiment was echoed by @khaledx1000, who dryly noted, "Duolingo has a lot of work to do."

• Secret Machine Business: The sudden shift from polite English to encrypted screeching gave many viewers immediate sci-fi horror vibes. Commenter @arsenblackwell hilariously translated the pivot: "I'm AI" "No way, me too" "Let's keep talking in private" "Beep beep beep". Taking it a step further into Terminator territory, @llBLINKll warned, "This is gonna be scariest sound you'll hear when they're looking for you".

• Digital Romance: Meanwhile, top hero commenter @iamyaaay5825 decided to anthropomorphize the hardware itself, imagining the physical device reminiscing about the high-speed data exchange a decade later: "The phone 10 years after: Was she flirting with me?"