Shiny title with the actual typing speed so well hidden.
I'm surprised, though, that the most efficient way to do this is still to have the person imagine physically drawing the letters by hand. I know motor neurons are probably our most reliable output, but I would still think that, with all the advances in training from noisy data in the past decade, that training what the thought of "A", "B" etc look like in the head would be doable.
Or even what the thought of hearing or saying "A", "B" etc looks like. The auditory cortex is activated when we imagine sounds. Or, if they wanted to stick to motor neurons, could they have the person imagine saying the letters with their mouth?
I'm sure they've thought about this stuff and it's harder than it seems, of course. But I would just predict that brain-computer interfaces 20 years from now won't involve imagining using your hand to write letters.
For context, I did my PhD in the lab that did the work in this article.
Honest question: how so? We should expect a direct neural interface to far exceed the speed of any manual input device, especially after 40-50 years of research.
GPT-3 is also very impressive to me, even though 30 years ago I thought we'd have Hal by now.
Some problems just turn out to be way harder than anyone anticipated, and so when they make advances I'm impressed.
Counterpoint: If this were the case I would have already heard about techies getting brain implants to optimise their communication.
Since that hasn't happened, the only logical assumption is that available neural interfaces are slower than existing manual input methods.