News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy by nee1r on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @12:49PM (#49185421)
are you specifically focused on non-invasive methods/why? seems like you reach a noise barrier which limits things like this
Re:I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy by foolswisdom on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @02:27PM (#49186895)
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.

Re:I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy by programd on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @07:34PM (#49190507)
The hardware is a helmet with a buch of sensors and IR LEDs on the inside. There's a writeup of the process and a picture of the outside here:

https://condu.it/thought/10k-hours

Their data acquisition routine was driven by Claude and they were recruiting random people off Craigslist pretty aggressively a few months back. I know a couple of folks who responded out of curiosity and described a very janky setup in the rented basements of a couple of residential houses in SF. From what I heard about the setup the data they got must have been incredibly noisy.

To the people who are sceptical here, I wouldn't count them out yet. They almost certainly can get funding with what they captured, which would get them better hardware. And given the state of brain scanning - people have captured images from scanned brain activity some years ago as I recall - I'd say they have a good shot. But yeah, it's not telepathy.

Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195109