I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

I kept expecting it to turn into a horror short story.

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Well, the text-to-thought direction feels less sci-fi, and combining both would amount to kind of telepathy.

But sure, you're right. Reading is not a deterministic mapping of text to thoughts.

Apart from the trouble of defining what a thought is, independent from the person who thinks it.

Me thinking of grabbing a mug of coffee is a different thought from you doing the same... defining "thought" pulls in a whole jungle of epistemology (maybe I should say philosophy, more broadly, I'm not in the field).

Is there an abstract concept of "the thought of raising your left index finger"? Or "the thought of remembering severe pain"? Etc etc

Next you'll want the term "Artificial Intelligence" reserved for actual artificial intelligence.

next they're going to set up thought-triggered Amazon purchases and say that moving the object from the warehouse to your home constitutes telekinesis.

ever since Elon did his "promise full self-driving every year" thing, entrepreneurs been on a weird sort of fiction escalator.

thought-to-text is incredible. imagine doing something that remarkable with your life and feeling the need to exaggerate.

Neuralink to Neuralink users

They are going to have to come up with better portable noninvasive technology.

Technically fMRI is noninvasive; it is just a bit inconvenient for everyday use.

I can see legit use cases where people simply can't communicate in any physical way. People with locked-in syndrome, etc.

But, obviously those only make up a small number of people.

Strapping a mind-reading machine onto some detainee is probably the more likely case.

This might be naive, but I think the idea is to replace your keyboard

After #6, the ASI has replaced you. Seems to be the goal for some of these folks.

I think I think I think it will be eventually.

Same. I'm still not sure it isn't.

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Most people get quite tired when talking for long periods. You can train that over a long period, but putting on a headset would certainly be more convenient.

Good to know I'll still have the reassurance of a 9:30 standup even though AI is reading my thoughts.

The most incredible part of Star Trek to me is not the warp drive or transporter, it's that they open flawless video links with alien species of every description with 100% reliability.

> My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth

Sounds magical

What's a president? King Trump II has been our leader as long as I can remember!

nice double entendre on "dictate", there.

We can finally have ads in our dreams like Futurama.

Their data collection is naturally based off of people talking or typing: https://condu.it/thought/10k-hours

So you'd need to force people to somehow think the same things they do when talking or typing, without actually performing those actions. If you can do that, why not just have them talk?

No. This is the philosophical basis of the fifth amendment.

It's 2035. I wake up, walk over to my chair, and plug in my government-mandated Neuralink™ adaptor. I'll spend the rest of my 18 hour work day haunched over my desk while the minutiae of my thoughts are recorded to permanent record for the next iteration of Grok-14.5™ training.

..."on Mars in a self-driving Tesla."

That's easily solved!

The Conduit® Thinkerface® Pro Band will contain a small 90B dense local model that pre-screens your Conduit® NeuroTokens® stream for compliance against the Conduit® Acceptable Usage Policy applicable for your region and subscription tier.

If non-compliance is detected you'll be promptly notified via a small current applied to the Conduit® ThinkRight® Human Training Electrodes embedded within your band. Intensity and duration are dynamically adjusted until compliance is restored.

Even better, because this all happens on-device before your Conduit® NeuroTokens® are sent to the Conduit® NeuroServer®, non-compliant thoughts don't count towards your Conduit® Daily Thinking Allowance or expend credits from your Conduit® Additional Thinking Purchase Plan.

Yeah, this whole area of UX scares me. Silent speech techniques could strike a balance, but it seems obvious it wont stop there - consider what a state actor would do if they could skip interrogation altogether?

Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.

  I’m generally pro-privacy, but here’s the hard truth: at my startup, we disabled keyboard input in our app Slopgen and switched the default to Conduit Thought Input™, and only 2% of users bothered to navigate the 17 submenus and submit their SSN and face scan to re-enable typing. Yep, 2%, that’s all.

  DAUs only decreased by ≈11%, but our ARR is already up 170% thanks to our AdThink™ revenue sharing agreement, and only 1% of users argued with our Fin.ai bot for the 45 minutes needed give a thumbs down feedback about the change.

  Let’s face it: talk is cheap but users *want* these features, revealed preference *always* tells the real story. Better get used to it now or get left behind.

As someone with OCD, this tech is pretty far up there in terms of potential nightmares.

"My AI just sent my boss a 12 paragraph screed because I thought about how much I hate him"

Just wait until advertisers can get in on your real-time mental stream of thought.

This is a Black Mirror episode coming to life.

These are all very easy things to do. People with significant resources just benefit from them not being solved.

There is probably good money in upgrading the polygraph security clearance ritual for the 21st century.

It doesn’t even really need to work of course.

> But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.

The statement implies that the company has some secret hardware that can, or at least, is close to doing that. That would blow my mind, but the author seems to believe it.

As an aside, I believe the author is a she.

> Do these clowns actually forget that part?

No, they are aware. You and I are not the audience for this post. People with capital to invest are the intended audience.

From the article

> It’s hard to collect enough data using invasive methods. Few people want a chip in their brain! But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.

As employees they have unlimited usage IIRC, and also these kinds of tasks can be surprisingly token efficient because a very large chunk of time is spent waiting for the calculation to finish, and AI agents love to run calculations excessively.

"probably in our lifetime"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE

vim already exists

According to her Wikipedia page, she's ~23 and went to Harvard, so A) her life experience is limited, B) most of the experience she does have involves being on a path to elitehood, and C) she probably sees a chance at a life-changing amount of money here.

People like this are the input side of the "oops we built the Torment Nexus" pipeline.

Inevitablism, a fundamentalist belief system that resolves every moral hazard with an appeal to the inevitable. "we can't let someone else do this first"

It's called being insulated from the immediate consequences of their actions and hubris.

> Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0

What collapse of web 2.0?

Technically the website we're on is web 2.0 because we're interacting as users.

I don't think it's naiveté on their part to want to build new things. I think you're just jaded and hyperfocusing on the negatives.

I understand where you are coming from. Yet.

Neuralink exists since 10 years, is in clinical trial, has been implanted on a living human being in 2 years ago.

The lack of adults in the room to set rules around moral hazard is hardly her generation's fault.

To me, this reads as an attempt to raise easy investment money.

well she is only 23 so naivete would make sense, although it looks like she held some AI safety roles so...

"Die Gedanken sind frei..." - can someone guess them? A truly dystopian question.

It is been 10 years ago when I looked through some research in that area. Back then it was the problem to get enough good signal. Has the situation changed radically here for non-invasive electrodes or portable detectors?

I understand that the approach would be to turn weak signal, context, and LLM based signal processing into useful human computer interaction. For everything else, I have the feeling we are still in speculative territory.

I think this is actually marginally less evil than Meta Tribe. The whole neuro space is dangerous and while people go on about “AI safety” the world will trend towards this madness.

And this will provoke “well we need to regulate AI then”. No, you need to regulate poking around in people’s brains without asking them before that becomes normal.

sure would be cool to transfer memories. Then we'd be able to download how to fly a helicopter.pdf right to our brains like in the matrix.

Me too. I have meta glasses and it caps at 3 minutes and theres no auto recording.

if you get an earworm you will have to pay royalties

Simple, think about going right

They will also want to beam back the response straight back into your brain one day.

No worries, I'm sure there won't be Flock cameras reading your thought crimes as you drive/walk by.

> Can't make a neural interface worth a damn without cracking open a few skulls.

I immediately thought, ironically, your neurology wrote that with a computer and HN humans' neurologies read it with computers.

>‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?

It always had that edge. Maybe technology in general always has a somewhat pagan flavor to it (for example JPL/Jack Parsons). Its just becoming a bit more mainstream now due to AGI larping.

I wouldn't ever use the word satanic due to the cultural implications, but I've long felt that there's a certain type of person – they walk among us here on HN – who speak about AI, AGI and ASI with a weird religiosity and fervor. These are the priests and missionaries of the new faith; people who, under any other circumstance, would typically consider themselves too rational for religion, yet now find themselves proselytizing to nonbelievers, chastising and debating the AI atheists, and preaching always the Book of Dario.

I think it’s the result of the LessWrong/rationalist crowd mixing with cult of personality VCs like Peter Thiel. The rationalists have always been pretty culty, the VCs gave them unlimited capital. All of that happening in a tight ecosystem like Silicon Valley and you somehow get the current AI tech world. AGI is seen as a religious figure to which we owe to sacrifice pretty much everything, with very high urgency, or else we will be lost. And everybody wants to be the messiah announcing it coming, to be the one who really believed and should be rewarded

All of this tech has turned to ashes in my mouth

There has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning.

And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live.

On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.

I feel the complete opposite.

Years ago I was close to disavowing technology and only doing the minimal effort needed to keep up with my job, because I'd gotten bored and disillusioned with it. Anything more than a small hobby project had accumulated too much complexity and busywork for me to feel excited about working on it. I suffered through it for the sake of the few things I cared about most, but it took its toll on me. I didn't have the infinite energy I may have had for my favorite projects in high school anymore.

But then this new wave of AI came along. First there was Copilot, and I was in awe not necessarily at its immediate practicality, but the potential it demonstrated. I felt the embers of passion tentatively peek their heads out from wherever I'd previously buried them.

Every new leap, computing became more and more rewarding again.

First general searches became incredibly easier to find the relevant bits I wanted from. I actually wanted to look things up again now that I didn't have to grok dozens of pages of Google or Stack Overflow. I got my custom home router configured the way I wanted it instead of giving up or settling for copying some known config that wasn't quite what I wanted, after a small amount of trial and error.

Then it became reasonably competent at simple but tedious tasks, at least 90% where the last 10% was easy to fix by hand. Enormous git conflict to slog through? Instead of staring at the screen feeling my heart sink and wandering off to bedrot instead, I felt excited at the prospect that I could instead command the computer to do it for me, and it was actually motivating to get that to work. Instead of feeling too exhausted and annoyed to keep working, I felt rewarded and refreshed.

Then it started writing entire code files, then entire features, then entire applications all on its own, with my guidance and input on architectural decisions and aesthetics. Performing entire FreeBSD upgrades while keeping custom kernel module packages working, fixing Gentoo systems with messed up USE flags and an otherwise intractable dependency hell to sift through, hell, even writing entire kernel patches to fix sleep mode and graphics problems I'd been having on my 2010 Macbook Pro with Gentoo installed. I feel something reminiscent of my memories of opening Christmas presents as a child when the AI is done making something I'm super excited for.

I'm eternally grateful for the current AI zeitgeist in the tech world. We're living in the best time so far in history to be into tech. And things like Conduit? How would you not be excited for something with so much potential to be made? Even if you don't like it, imagine what it could mean for people with communication disabilities, carpal tunnel, etc. I'd love to be able to just type with my thoughts, and sending them straight into an AI sounds awesome too.

If this is satanic then I don't want to go to heaven. I feel more joy, excitement, and liberatory potential in technology than I have at any point in my life. I even feel more liberated to learn more - without the tedium raising my cortisol and stealing my attention all day, I'm actually more inclined to do things like write code in vim on my VT320 or read over code there with no distractions or AI input. I've reaped great rewards from being able to think more clearly and at higher levels of abstraction, free of the bonds of bullshit and tedium, at peace in the knowledge that I will never have to shave a yak against my will ever again.

I don't know about satanic, but there are definitely some cult-y, brainwashed-y vibes.

It not about creating anymore. It's about power, and now a certain group of the top tech elite have experienced enough power that they're having delusions of grandeur. Those delusions cater to the dark desires that live inside most humans - to have control over everyone and everything.

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i dont want it to be wired into my head but maybe a glass or something where i can communicate with it almost silently

This line is taken very weirdly out of context in this comment though.

The article's topic is brain to AI interfaces. She mentions this quote as a "vision" from 2035, where not only can thoughts inform AI but AI can respond in thought too.

When we get used to a good tool it becomes an extension of ourselves.

How is this AI psychosis? Is it that it's very unrealistic for such an interface to be created in the next 10 years? Or is it that there's a fear of letting AI interfere with one's thoughts lest they lose themselves?

This just confuses me so much. They know the definition of what "self" means, is it just broken because this is the first time they can interact with another seemingly complex system without feeling exploited or manipulated? Have they never cooperated with another person with a mutual goal? Not that LLMs would ever be on that level.

Ironically, or sadly (or perhaps a mixture of these+), this statement was absolutely informed (hopefully not inspired) by an LLM.

Psychosis is the inability to distinguish what is real. This seems closer to something like embodied cognition or body schema extension. There are documented cases where the brain adapts to tool use (e.g. a mechanical grabber) by modeling it as an extended part of the user's body. It's more a dissolving of the boundaries between self and other than an inability to distinguish them.

We call this (or basically any AI-related anomalous behavior) "AI psychosis" today. The quoted text is a prediction of the end-state of her work in 2035.

Without commenting on how realistic it is, I will point out that if you took the average person on the street taking a call on their bluetooth earbuds, and send them back just ~2 decades, they would look like delusional people talking to themselves.

I suspect a lot of the weirdness we see today would be normalized in the future, even if somewhat annoying (like BrainRot.)

Agreed.

Help me understand... If one uses AI for anything but coding, or purely utilitarian purposes, they are psychotic?

This is not intended to be provocative. I am asking sincerely. I have a lot of AI sessions, that I value enough to have reviewed multiple times, over months. And indeed, I explored much that I never would have without the AI, and enjoyed it. Even appreciated it. The bulk of my saved material is research, but at least a gigabyte is wild speculation, philosophy, and assisted thinking.

At what point does what the user thinks is a meaningful experience become psychosis, or is it that exactly; attributing meaningfulness is the symptom?

Edit: The "no longer other" statement, I should admit, is familiar to me. There can be, on rare occasion, what I have thought of abstractly as harmonic resonance, some kind of strange emergent state between two interlocutors. Maybe that is the psychosis?

I guess I will circle around again, because the miserable folks here found cause to flag, yes, flag my question. But you seem pretty smart, really smart, and good at judging people. So I will ask you more directly this time to back your statement. The polite version failed.

Please apply your great psychological prowess to Roman Yampolskiy or Tegmark. Those might require more than a cheap comment to leave uncontested by the spineless swarm here.

Go on. Make your case. I can still read it even if this comment is flagged again.

That, or just SV madness.

If you're in northern California anywhere near the Bay Area, work in tech, and are reading this, I am literally begging you to leave your echo chamber. This isn't healthy or grounded in reality in any way, shape, or form. It's not just the AI stuff, it's the whole mindset. Humans aren't meant to operate in that sort of environment where there's unlimited funding and no consequence.

Hardly a novel concept in technology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/19/iphone-ap...