OpenAI researcher Naomi Bashkansky revealed on X that she has left OpenAI to join Conduit as a founding researcher. She mentioned that Conduit will be building telepathy through thought-to-text models, trained on “non-invasive neural data.”
In a blog post, Bashkansky predicted that within a couple of years, the primary way people interact with AI will be through their thoughts. “They will not be a super-smart automated intern or coworker that you desperately try to keep up with. They will be a natural, joyful extension of you,” Bashkansky said.
She also outlined a timeline in which, by 2030, the industry would expand and embrace Conduit’s telepathic technology. Looking further ahead, she predicted that by 2035, AI would no longer be viewed as “the other,” citing industry leaders Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who have predicted a convergence of human brains and AI.
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“How superhuman 2035 looks depends directly on how superhuman we, as society, decide to make our AIs. Perhaps we choose to pace ourselves. But I like that this is literally a human-in-the-loop vision of the future, where AI directly empowers humans rather than replacing us,” Bashkansky said.
Some social media users have questioned Bashkansky’s claims about the technology being “non-invasive.”
“This will never not be invasive lol. You can’t just put the words ‘non-invasive’ in front like the entire premise isn’t invasive by any sane standard. What are you smoking?” one X user said, responding to Bashkansky’s post.
Conduit is a San Francisco startup building brain-computer interfaces without surgery. It reportedly does not require implants or electrodes, just a headset that reads neural signals from outside the body and turns them into text.
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The company was cofounded by Rio Popper, who studied at Oxford, and Clem von Stengel, a Cambridge graduate who is the CEO. Conduit revealed in a blog post that the team spent six months collecting roughly 10,000 hours of neuro-language data from thousands of people, which it calls the largest dataset of its kind anywhere.
Reports also mentioned that aside from being a researcher, Bashkansky is a Woman International Master in chess, a title one rung below Woman Grandmaster, and a former World School Chess Champion in the girls’ under-13 division
Conduit hasn’t disclosed a funding round, and there’s no confirmed valuation attached to the company yet.