From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery
ai.meta.com
ai.meta.com
The fact that they provide code and dataset is really praiseworthy.
- 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.
Not yet. There are plenty of transformer based models out there for EEG but they so far do not outperform the SOTA “traditional” (ML/DL) models.
> While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking.
> Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding...
Something can have "good takes" but still run an unacceptable risk of ending badly
The decent news is that if you search "neural privacy laws," you will find some states are already on top of it, a bit. We need national laws, in every country ASAP. This needs to happen before there are billions in economic inertia behind BCIs.
One point is that this is not “mind reading”. This is “motor command reading”. This is really no different than placing recording electrodes near motor neurons that direct vocalization. Or in terminal nerve fibers that move finger and wrist muscles.
For Meta this is a PR stunt of the type that I saw staged at a Human Brain Project demo in Budapest in 2012 in with an EEG-instrumented operator tried to move a robot around the stage with HBP leaders trying to narrate the “wonders of it all”. Sadly it was one of those classic demo failures in front of 200 neuroscientists and EU science bureaucrats. Didn’t stop the EU from funding the application the next year. About 1 billion euros not well spent.
I think anyone in 1995, who was accurately predicting our current state of privacy would have sounded like a paranoid lunatic as well.
I personally have a stammer. While mine is less severe, and I doesn't need directly it, I know several people that would quite be glad of the benefits that it could bring to them. (Example: pass online interviews).
I agree however of the privacy concerns. We could limit it in a first time to medical devices for example, or have some privacy laws in place.
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected signs of depression. Full court press on all ad partners aiming for that group.
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected that this user pictures driving fast, our insurance partners have the user profile updated.
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected signs of <insert any fleeting thought that you would never act upon> - as required by local regulations, they are now labeled by the state as <that>.
It's an improvement in CPA or ROAS.
As an aside, disappointed by the very low quality of comments on this article here.
Source: spouse works in a sleep lab studying dreams with MRI
How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?
[0] https://med.umn.edu/news/university-minnesota-developing-com...
[1] https://designawards.core77.com/Strategy-Research/95329/A-ne...
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...
It's a little spooky how real that could now be. Oh and that series was a dystopian series because ofc it was
What I mean by that is we'll have a very limited number of words to which a dog's brainwaves can be translated to since we aren't able to understand them beyond their basic instincts of food, survival, fear, affection towards their owner etc.
There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.
I do wonder how animals think. Perhaps this resolution would also be the theoretical maximum?
There are many dogs that have been trained to press buttons corresponding to words, in the extreme case tens/hundreds of buttons/words, and they can even construct rudimentary sentences. It doesn't seem insane to me that we could perhaps do a very rudimentary version of this for dogs, given a large enough training set.
Might be of use.
there's a movie about that default human hubris, it spoils it though
The "vocabulary resolution being low" basically just means within our own limited context, it's low. But that doesn't mean it's a good measure. Heck, I'd say it isn't.
- Let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!
Ok, friend, here you go. - opens door.
- Wow super cool, now let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!
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.
When the bad guys try they just get the lyrics to Yoko Ono music.
Better than text-stripping the internet - this thing will soon be pulling the logits as well.
they'll just put it buried on page 450 of the meta glasses 3 or something
"Don't be snarky."
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
2035: every phone comes with one so you can can do things without clicking any yucky buttons
2036: China mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and promote social harmony. EU and US condemn. the media condemns.
2037: the EU mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and fight malinformation. the media applauds.
2038: the US, ruled by the blue party, mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat white nationalism. the red party condemns.
2039: the US, now ruled by the red party, abolishes the previous law and introduces a new one, mandating phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat illegal immigration. the blue party condemns.
There are no layoffs in Ba Sing Se.
Meta has shown remarkable disregard to users' and employees' privacy.
Why should that not come up when discussing an entirely new dystopian technology that allows them to invade privacy at scale?
To take some specific piece of research going on in one corner of $BigCorp, and tar it with the brush of general sentiment about $BigCorp, is a classic example of generic tangent: where the topic goes from something specific-and-more-interesting, to something generic-and-more-indignant. We've learned over the years that this is exactly the wrong direction for HN threads to head in. Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
Funded by the company that in the recent past, got exposed trying to track employees computer interactions and grabbing screens. Not long before that, it was leaked that employees and contractors were watching videos recorded from meta/rayban smartglasses.
I'm a little bit baffled by the defense here. The point of having guidelines is to use your judgement when applying them.
Not only that but less-interesting discussion is usually more-indignant, which makes sense when discussion abandons the actual content of an article (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So we end up losing along two axes: loss of information and rise of inflammation.