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 · 2026-06-30 21:53:55 UTC
The size of that machine
lwhi · 2026-06-30 21:57:22 UTC
The participants end up looking a bit like Toad from Mariokart.
How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?
jeffbee · 2026-06-30 22:36:05 UTC
Patients should get a "My other hat is a superconducting quantum interferometer" hat.
Junk_Collector · 2026-06-30 22:00:16 UTC
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 · 2026-06-30 22:05:55 UTC
why is there no live demo? Anyone seen this in action? Can someone share a demo video or something
alexpotato · 2026-06-30 22:07:17 UTC
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.
Someone should try it while sleeping and see if anything is related to a dream.
iwassayinbourns · 2026-06-30 22:51:41 UTC
This wouldn’t work. Apart from it being very difficult to get people to sleep deeply enough for them to dream in machines like this, the brain state is very different whilst asleep compared with awake. Also the data generated from typing would be very different than thought since it’s likely picking up on broad electrical activity in the primary motor cortex.
Source: spouse works in a sleep lab studying dreams with MRI
ASTP001 · 2026-06-30 23:04:47 UTC
what sleep lab does your spouse work at? i'm curious about studying dreams
whimsicalism · 2026-06-30 22:17:58 UTC
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 · 2026-06-30 22:25:11 UTC
[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 · 2026-06-30 21:50:34 UTC
The future is dark.
TheOtherHobbes · 2026-06-30 21:51:10 UTC
A word recondition ration of 78% is still petty poop.
dang · 2026-06-30 22:28:59 UTC
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
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 · 2026-06-30 21:54:38 UTC
The dystopian future will use this to get passwords/passphrases.
LPisGood · 2026-06-30 22:02:29 UTC
Wouldn’t a wrench work just as well?
sublinear · 2026-06-30 22:21:25 UTC
It's much easier to resist torture.
1970-01-01 · 2026-06-30 22:37:27 UTC
No, the wrench only works as a threat. Once you beat the brains out of someone, you can't try again.
NiloCK · 2026-06-30 21:55:11 UTC
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 · 2026-06-30 21:58:30 UTC
I can actually see this happening someday. Theoretical physicists could charge thousands of dollars an hour.
throwawalien · 2026-06-30 22:01:31 UTC
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 · 2026-06-30 22:32:15 UTC
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 · 2026-06-30 22:24:50 UTC
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
It'll be a cold day in hell before Meta gets access to my brainwaves. Good heavens, can you imagine?
kibwen · 2026-06-30 22:11:36 UTC
I'm glad that, with any luck, I'll be dead before this kind of thing is commonplace.
vlian2088 · 2026-06-30 23:57:29 UTC
2034: brainwave readers are now production-ready
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.
tantalor · 2026-06-30 22:01:06 UTC
Do they test against people not in their training cohort?
fooker · 2026-06-30 22:02:51 UTC
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 · 2026-06-30 22:28:45 UTC
If this happens, I'll be listening to music with the most annoying lyrics on repeat.
botfriendsarent · 2026-06-30 22:04:13 UTC
I tried it all it said was "Hot or not?" before it crashed
setnone · 2026-06-30 22:23:26 UTC
non-invasive tech from meta? i don't buy that
egypturnash · 2026-06-30 22:41:29 UTC
[flagged]
Gigachad · 2026-07-01 00:05:06 UTC
Imagine the shareholder value if he could just beam ads directly in to your brain.
johnsmith1840 · 2026-07-01 00:15:25 UTC
Lightspeed briefs, for the discriminating crotch!
dang · 2026-07-01 01:52:40 UTC
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
fooker · 2026-06-30 23:16:07 UTC
@dang How is this offtopic?
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?
t_gamer_kle · 2026-06-30 22:37:31 UTC
And you reverse it to go from words to brain waves! Mind reading at a distance.
dclavijo · 2026-06-30 22:57:12 UTC
great news!, I would like to conversate with my dog...i'm sure he has more important thing than lots of people
ksd482 · 2026-06-30 23:04:42 UTC
If one were to go about translating brain waves from dogs to meaning, we'd run into a big problem immediately: vocabulary resolution.
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?
supern0va · 2026-06-30 23:16:23 UTC
>There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.
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.
gloyoyo · 2026-06-30 23:34:54 UTC
Some important ones like, "earthquake", "Seizure", etc...
Might be of use.
yieldcrv · 2026-07-01 00:00:12 UTC
but that's imposing our language on them, when we should be understanding them
there's a movie about that default human hubris, it spoils it though
voxelghost · 2026-06-30 23:29:38 UTC
Now, your dogs may very well be smarter than mine. But here's how I imagine a convo with my dogs would go.
- 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 !!
righthand · 2026-07-01 00:09:44 UTC
Does your dog want to converse with you or anyone?
Havoc · 2026-06-30 23:54:58 UTC
Reminds me of the scene in series Incorporated where a megacorp uses this sort of tech to interrogate an employee from a competitor mega-corp to get at a trade secret.
It's a little spooky how real that could now be. Oh and that series was a dystopian series because ofc it was
bpiche · 2026-07-01 00:16:53 UTC
I still think of this video often and wonder if it is building on any of that technology, almost 10 years old now. Just looking at this whitepaper it seems like they both use some kind of infrared transcranial light, but never imagined the machine in the original iteration was so big
[Regina Dugan's Keynote at Facebook F8 2017 | Inverse]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCDWKdmwhUI
Please see my bio for the full rant. The key take-away is:
> 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...
smusamashah · 2026-07-01 01:06:31 UTC
This is the most pessimistic take on this tech here. You can view anything with the same lens.
ImPostingOnHN · 2026-07-01 01:17:51 UTC
Saying "this is the most pessimistic take" doesn't make for good discussion.
Something can have "good takes" but still run an unacceptable risk of ending badly
consumer451 · 2026-07-01 01:26:34 UTC
I ain't young. I have seen this all play out before. It's just extrapolating based on what we did with cookies, browsing history, cell tower data, etc... unless we pass very strict neural privacy laws, why wouldn't it go the same way?
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.
Georgelemental · 2026-07-01 02:11:33 UTC
The way to not get the most pessimistic outcome is to work for a better one, and to do that you have to first recognize the danger
moolcool · 2026-07-01 03:31:42 UTC
I’m trying to not be snarky here, but it is difficult to have an optimistic take about an advertising company working on mind reading technology. At some point we have to call a spade a spade, I think.
zuzululu · 2026-07-01 01:56:15 UTC
I'm not sure whether to be worried or not and I am not talking about whatever you wrote but for your own sake , it seems to be extremely paranoid style of writing
consumer451 · 2026-07-01 03:03:53 UTC
It is impossible not to sound like a kook when discussing this topic.
I think anyone in 1995, who was accurately predicting our current state of privacy would have sounded like a paranoid lunatic as well.
LowLevelKernel · 2026-07-01 01:34:40 UTC
There were alpha block classes
smath · 2026-07-01 02:37:54 UTC
Are they trying to infer characters/words from brain waves? I would have thought the brain is thinking in concepts rather than actual words
nok22kon · 2026-07-01 04:01:01 UTC
no contradiction, both can be true, you think in concepts, then verbalize, which is what they capture
emsign · 2026-07-01 03:40:40 UTC
I hate this because we have crazy billionaires who want to abuse this technology. But apart from tht it's pretty cool, though I hate that it's being developed in this dark day and age. Miserable times.
Comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48685558
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...
How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?
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.
Source: spouse works in a sleep lab studying dreams with MRI
As an aside, disappointed by the very low quality of comments on this article here.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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?
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
- 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 !!
It's a little spooky how real that could now be. Oh and that series was a dystopian series because ofc it was
> 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.
I think anyone in 1995, who was accurately predicting our current state of privacy would have sounded like a paranoid lunatic as well.