frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain2qwerty-brain-ai-human-communication/?_fb_noscript=1
56•alok-g•1h ago

Comments

mpenick•1h ago
Now the remaining problem is to make Magnetoencephalography devices affordable and not insanely huge.
traverseda•53m ago
From a few days ago, uses ultrasound.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48685558

greentea23•20m ago
The ultrasound technique there is more like MRI, static imaging, not measuring dynamic electrical signals. Also, regardless of static vs moving, all of this hinges on massive relatively expensive devices (ultrasound is never going to be dirt cheap or miniaturized compared to a smartwatch or even a VR headset) and for the subject to remain perfectly still and probably go through regular calibration sequences. All for <75% accuracy on simple classification tasks. The information mixes in the propagation out of the skull, erasing information. It's analogous to trying to do a row hammer attack on a CPU from outside the computer case.

Also, in the Meta result here, "while actively typing" is actually quite different than passive mind reading because the motor cortex sits nicely near the top surface of the skull, and the muscle memory from past typing makes for a nice well formed signal to measure and classify. It's the same trick over and over since the Brown BrainGate days where you can have people perform or imagine movements and get a decent but not good classification result, and it never gets much better after that trick is exploited. Project dies, VCs and grant writers forget or never appreciated the effect, time goes by, a grad student or corporate research lackey rediscovers it, media puts out an article claiming mind reading is here, and the cycle repeats...

ge96•51m ago
The size of that machine
lwhi•48m ago
The participants end up looking a bit like Toad from Mariokart.

How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?

jeffbee•9m ago
Patients should get a "My other hat is a superconducting quantum interferometer" hat.
Junk_Collector•45m ago
It's worth noting that this isn't new technology. This paper is specifically about how their new technique provides a small but statistically significant improvement on existing techniques.

The fact that they provide code and dataset is really praiseworthy.

hackermeows•39m ago
why is there no live demo? Anyone seen this in action? Can someone share a demo video or something
alexpotato•38m ago
So attended an interesting talk a couple years ago:

- fMRI and/or brain implants are the best to figure out brain waves

- but they are expensive or invasive

- EEG is a lot cheaper and easier but not as precise

- BUT what if you used LLMs to analyze EEG data taken at the same time as brain implants etc

The answer seemed to be that "yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs". Curious to see where this ends up and hopefully not that like that Black Mirror episode with the brain scanning leading to murders.

devindotcom•21m ago
Piramidal was doing that last I checked: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/23/piramidals-foundation-mode...
GaggiX•31m ago
Someone should try it while sleeping and see if anything is related to a dream.
whimsicalism•27m ago
Interesting -- really excited for the future of human-brain interfaces and just in general more interface exploration enabled by large transformers. I'm already very excited by voice, although wish I could get something akin to the subvoc common in scifi novels. Seems like it would be an easier path than human-brain and would allow me to use voice models in public.

As an aside, disappointed by the very low quality of comments on this article here.

dang•20m ago
[stub for offtopicness]

p.s. come on you guys - this is not what HN is for. You may not owe $megacorp better but you owe this community better if you're participating here.

iLoveOncall•55m ago
The future is dark.
TheOtherHobbes•54m ago
A word recondition ration of 78% is still petty poop.
dang•16m ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

999900000999•52m ago
Feels like the premise for a spy comedy with a protagonist whose mind can’t be read.

When the bad guys try they just get the lyrics to Yoko Ono music.

1970-01-01•50m ago
The dystopian future will use this to get passwords/passphrases.
t_gamer_kle•8m ago
And you reverse it to go from words to brain waves! Mind reading at a distance.
LPisGood
•
43m ago
Wouldn’t a wrench work just as well?
sublinear•24m ago
It's much easier to resist torture.
1970-01-01•8m ago
No, the wrench only works as a threat. Once you beat the brains out of someone, you can't try again.
NiloCK•50m ago
Any minute: wear it permanently to sell training data on LLMs. Take an audited IQ test to negotiate your rate.

Better than text-stripping the internet - this thing will soon be pulling the logits as well.

UltraSane•47m ago
I can actually see this happening someday. Theoretical physicists could charge thousands of dollars an hour.
throwawalien•44m ago
if you think they're going to pay people for their data you haven't been paying attention

they'll just put it buried on page 450 of the meta glasses 3 or something

UltraSane•13m ago
They are already paying scarce labor like medical doctors and lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to create training data. The RoI for training data is high because it can be used to train many models.
dang•20m ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Don't be snarky."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

NiloCK•8m ago
Great respect to site guidelines, and to you. Object on both counts.

1. The post was obviously bullish / optimistic on the technical capabilities. Not in the least dismissive.

2. The economics extrapolation is obvious. See current precedent for paid access for purchased screen-casts of dev work: https://pdoom.org/open_calls/04_crowd_cast.html

moolcool•45m ago
It'll be a cold day in hell before Meta gets access to my brainwaves. Good heavens, can you imagine?
kibwen•33m ago
I'm glad that, with any luck, I'll be dead before this kind of thing is commonplace.
tantalor•44m ago
Do they test against people not in their training cohort?
fooker•42m ago
Coming soon to a Meta office near you: brain-scanning to make sure employees are focused, happy, and productive!

There are no layoffs in Ba Sing Se.

celeries•16m ago
If this happens, I'll be listening to music with the most annoying lyrics on repeat.
botfriendsarent•41m ago
I tried it all it said was "Hot or not?" before it crashed
setnone•22m ago
non-invasive tech from meta? i don't buy that

Trump Reports at Least $1.4B in 2025 Crypto Earnings

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-30/trump-reports-at-least-1-2-billion-in-crypto-e...
1•petethomas•1m ago•0 comments

Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-you-to-log-in-to-use-old-reddit-com/
1•righthand•3m ago•0 comments

Quran MCP

https://mcp.quran.ai/
1•abdelhousni•3m ago•0 comments

Scalable GANs with Transformers

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24935
1•MediaSquirrel•3m ago•0 comments

Vroni Is a Software Delegate

https://www.vroni.com/
1•doener•7m ago•0 comments

AWS Service Availability Updates

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/06/aws-service-availability/
1•dabinat•7m ago•0 comments

Kids online safety package clears House

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/kids-internet-and-digital-safety-act-passes-house-free-spe...
1•Cider9986•8m ago•1 comments

Capacitor Plague

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
2•leonidasv•8m ago•0 comments

Free Electron Lasers (2017) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKqof77pKBc
1•nharada•8m ago•0 comments

22x memory amp DoS in Anthropic's buffa protobuf decoder (CVE-2026-55407)

https://www.endorlabs.com/learn/endor-labs-ai-sast-finds-zero-day-cve-2026-55407-buffa
2•bugvader•9m ago•0 comments

Doughnut (Economic Model)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)
1•doener•10m ago•0 comments

Fanianolima667 Gmail.com

https://blog.cloudflare.com/wordpress-pingback-attacks-and-our-waf/
1•Alefmax•10m ago•0 comments

Claude Code Skills: 98 AI architectures, Haiku at 93% of Fable 5 quality

https://github.com/GPire/claude-skills-swarm
1•GPrab•10m ago•0 comments

We Built a Tool to Predict Runaway LLM Costs (Before They Kill Your Margins)

https://the746th.substack.com/p/before-you-scale
1•dcriglerd•10m ago•0 comments

Hatari – Online Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon Emulator

https://hatari.frama.io/hatari/online/hatari.html
3•gregsadetsky•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TakoVM – open-source sandboxing for your agent's code

https://github.com/Tako-Research/TakoVM
1•sakuraiben•12m ago•0 comments

As better chatbots get harder to build, AI turns to simulated worlds

https://www.science.org/content/article/better-chatbots-get-harder-build-ai-turns-simulated-worlds
1•sudo_cowsay•13m ago•0 comments

New AI approaches are connecting development, environment, and disease

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-ai-approaches-connecting-development-environment-disease
1•sudo_cowsay•14m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw Now Available on Android and iOS

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/openclaw-is-finally-available-on-android-and-ios/
1•bogdiyan•15m ago•0 comments

Autoresearch, Claude and Constrained Optimization

https://www.elliotcsmith.com/autoresearch-claude-and-constrained-optimization/
1•smitec•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Whenever Alignment Matters

https://vece.ai/
1•koliev•17m ago•0 comments

Lighthouse Agentic Browsing Scoring

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/agentic-browsing/scoring
2•m-hodges•22m ago•0 comments

AI is not going to make mathematicians obsolete

https://greyenlightenment.com/2026/06/27/ai-is-not-going-to-make-mathematicians-obsolete/
3•paulpauper•23m ago•1 comments

What does "technical" even mean?

https://pipsthoughts.substack.com/p/what-does-technical-even-mean
1•PenPressman•25m ago•0 comments

Never Trust a Number

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/never-trust-a-number
2•gk1•28m ago•0 comments

Devin Fusion: Frontier Performance at 35% Lower Cost

https://cognition.com/blog/devin-fusion
1•fanyangxyz33•30m ago•1 comments

Nerdle Review

https://dles.gg/reviews/nerdle
1•trizoza•30m ago•0 comments

Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/why-does-everyone-hate-ai
1•paulpauper•32m ago•0 comments

How p-hacking built the world's most expensive safety regime

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/low-dose-radiation-is-probably-fine
2•Lihh27•33m ago•0 comments

Improving agents from trajectories, in token space, with no weight updates

https://kinesthetic.dev/blog/specifying-the-agent/
3•ant-kinesthetic•35m ago•0 comments