Former OpenAI researcher co-founds Conduit to develop mind-reading AI

Ah, lovely. Another week, another former OpenAI researcher waltzing out the door with a startup that sounds like the title of a Black Mirror episode nobody asked for. Naomi Bashkansky departed the lab in late July 2026 — barely a month ago — to co-found Conduit, a company building AI models that 'decode brain activity into text without implanted devices.' No implants, you see, so no fiddly surgery. Just your thoughts, straight to text, presumably with a helpful little 'are you sure you meant to think that?' prompt.

The optimism is staggering. We currently cannot get a chatbot to reliably tell you who won the 2020 election, but Bashkansky is apparently confident we can pipe raw neural signals through a transformer and out the other end comes a coherent sentence. Never mind that the best neuroscience decoders today produce something closer to a drunk game of Taboo than actual telepathy. Conduit's marketing copy will no doubt promise 'reading your mind' while the engineering reality is a model confidently hallucinating that you're thinking about a cucumber when you're actually wondering whether you left the oven on. And this from an industry that promised us self-driving cars by 2021 and currently delivers robo-taxis that honk at each other all night. But sure, non-invasive telepathy is the mature business model.

And the 'without implanted devices' bit is the real kicker. Non-invasive mind-reading is the holy grail precisely because it's the one nobody can consent to implicitly — no electrode to notice, no implant to sign for. The only thing more frightening than a machine that can read your thoughts is a founder who thinks that's a product category rather than a human-rights violation. Still, you have to admire the hustle: a brand-new company, a month-old departure, and already the marketing write-up is writing itself. 'Conduit: because you were going to think it anyway.' But hey, it's 2026 and Conduit is hiring. Do send thoughts.