we don't know if that's due to inherent limitations of the tokenisation of audio, or a byproduct of reinforcement learning. In my own usage, I noticed a significant degradation in capabilities over time from when they initially released advanced voice mode. The model used to be able to sing, whisper, imitate sounds and tone just fine, but I imagine this was not intended and has subsequently been stunted via reinforcement learning.

I don't find the articles argument that this is due to tokenisation convincing.

They didn't say it's due to tokenization.

> This is likely because they’re trained on a lot of data generated synthetically with text-to-speech and/or because understanding the tone of the voice (apparently) doesn’t help the models make more accurate predictions.