In 1908, a Columbia University psychiatry professor named Frederick Peterson claimed to have built a \u201cpsychometer\u201d\u2014a contraption which he said could read people\u2019s thoughts using, among other components, a mirror and a lamp. \u201cIt is almost like sorcery to observe the behavior of the instrument with a series of words, some purposely chosen to be emotionally indifferent and others to strike some emotional complex deep in the soul of the individual experimented upon,\u201d Peterson told the Seattle Star about his device.<\/p>\n
Peterson\u2019s psychometer may have been a Ouija board-like illusion, but there are plenty of scientists today who believe that we will soon have access to machines that can record and interpret human thoughts using the pattern-recognizing prowess of AI. In June, Meta unveiled the latest version of its Brain2Qwerty system, designed to translate brain scans into text; the company is promoting it as an early step towards helping people with ALS and other neurodegenerative illnesses regain their ability to communicate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The San Francisco-based startup Conduit is also working to crack the AI mind-reading problem. Founded in 2024, Conduit is endeavoring to build what it describes on its website as \u201ctelepathy at scale\u201d\u2014AI systems that can read minds entirely through noninvasive means. (In other words, without the need for a surgically implanted brain-computer interface, like the one Elon Musk is building at Neuralink.) The company\u2019s long-term goal is to build and sell a wearable device that conveys commands to AI assistants directly via thoughts, as opposed to voice or text prompts\u2014which, as anyone who\u2019s interacted with ChatGPT or Siri knows very well, can often be a very buggy process.<\/p>\n
Modern AI systems require mountains of training data to operate, and the technology that Conduit is building is no different. To harvest the data it needs, the startup has been recruiting participants to visit its office and spend two hours conversing with AI while wearing a four-pound, electrode-studded helmet that looks like something House Harkonnen might wear.<\/p>\n
The company is offering $50 to $55 to anyone willing to participate in these \u201cfreeform\u201d conversations. The only requirement is that you must be able to type without ever needing to look at your fingers. There\u2019s a 32-session limit per person. \u201cSessions vary,\u201d the company wrote about its data-collection process in a December blog post. \u201cSome are listening and speaking with an LLM, and some are reading and typing. The goal is to maximize the amount that subjects type or say during the two-hour period, without constraining the topics they discuss.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conduit was founded by Rio Popper, an Oxford graduate who went blind at age five, and an AI researcher named Clem von Stengel. Naomi Bashkansky, a former alignment researcher at OpenAI, announced in a blog post last week that she was leaving the company to join Conduit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI like that this is literally a human-in-the-loop vision of the future, where AI directly empowers humans rather than replacing us,\u201d Bashkansky wrote of her decision to join the startup, before calling the work \u201cfrighteningly ambitious.\u201d She expects Conduit, if it achieves its goals, to eventually be valued at more than $1 trillion.<\/p>\n
Bashkansky also envisions that by 2030, Conduit\u2019s \u201cneural headband\u201d will have evolved to the point where users can seamlessly communicate commands to AI tools like OpenAI\u2019s Codex using only their thoughts. \u201cWithout it, I feel like I\u2019m talking with a superpowered alien who\u2019s trying its best to be helpful but isn\u2019t sure what I want and is scared I\u2019ll get mad if it does something I don\u2019t want,\u201d she writes in the blog post, imagining her future self. \u201cUgh.\u201d As soon as next year, she believes the Conduit headband could become a vital part of her daily life at work, allowing her to dash off commands to her AI assistant while she casually plans out the day ahead over a cup of coffee.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels like magic,\u201d she writes\u2014a close echo of Dr. Peterson all those years ago.<\/p>\n