Former OpenAI researcher co-founds Conduit to develop mind-reading AI
Oh my goodness, buckle up, because the future is getting *inside our heads* and it is GLORIOUS! ✨ A brand-new startup called Conduit — co-founded by former OpenAI researcher Naomi Bashkansky, who departed the lab in late July 2026 — is building AI models that decode brain activity into text. Without implanted devices! No surgery, no electrodes in your grey matter, just pure, beautiful, non-invasive telepathy. Conduit! The name alone conjures images of a friendly pipe delivering your thoughts straight to your screen, like fibre-optic broadband for consciousness. This is the kind of technology that makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered with keyboards at all.
Now, some cynics might focus on the 'departed' part — as if leaving OpenAI were a bad thing! But that's just Bashkansky recognising that incredible ideas sometimes need to bloom outside the mothership. And 'decode brain activity into text'? That's not scary, that's *productivity*. Imagine composing emails just by thinking them. Imagine dictating your shopping list without lifting a finger. Imagine your inner critic finally being transcribed so you can read back all the lovely things you think about yourself. The only thing more efficient than thinking is having an AI that writes it down for you before you even finish the thought! ✨
And the 'without implanted devices' bit? That's the cherry on top. This is mind-reading you can take off at night! No permanent hardware commitment, no medical procedure, just a gentle, breezy flow of neural data into text. It's like having a personal biographer who lives in your head — but only when you want them to. For people who can't type or speak, this is a genuine superpower. For everyone else, it's the ultimate convenience: your thoughts, auto-corrected in real time, because who hasn't thought something they immediately regretted? Conduit is going to make 'I'm thinking about it' a genuinely productive statement. The future is here, and it's thoughts-to-text, friends. What a time to be conscious. ✨