Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy
On Thursday, July 23rd, I resigned from OpenAI. On the 24th, I started as a Founding Researcher at Conduit. We're building telepathy: thought-to-text models, trained on non-invasive neural data.<br>I'll talk about:<br>Thought-to-text: what using telepathic tools will be like in 2027, 2030, and 2035<br>How do we build thought-to-text: why Conduit is collecting immense quantities of non-invasive neural data<br>Why I joined: I joined because of the audacious vision, the brilliant people, and the fun problems<br>Hi: about me<br>1. Thought-to-text, aka telepathy<br>My prediction: In a couple years, the main way we'll talk with our AIs is with our 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.<br>I wrote down vignettes of this future below. I view them as optimistic but highly plausible.<br>20272027 — A morning at ConduitI put a band around my head, and open my laptop at Conduit. It’s 9 am. My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth. I open, without loss of generality, Codex.<br>I think about the day's work as I look at my code, review yesterday's notes, and prepare for our 9:30 am standup. My GPT-7 agent has been chugging away at the new encoder I’ve been exploring for over a day now. I look at its work. I become confused by the plot labels, annoyed at the AI-speak in its first paragraph, and curious about the symbols in the equations. My vague thoughts get sent to Conduit's model, which uses its priors over language and the kinds of things I might say to output:
conduit://thought-stream → codex<br>$ decode --source=neural-latent --autosend --to=codex<br>thought_01 >I’m looking at your plots. Please relabel the legend, and add a text cell below with a simple description of each line.<br>thought_02 >I understand your 2nd paragraph of discussion, but please rewrite the first paragraph using the humanizer skill.<br>thought_03 >Make a textbox explaining the equations with cleaner notation.<br>streaming >█
The plot, paragraphs, and notation each took me 10 seconds to glance over. I have auto-send on, so after each 10-second chunk, the Conduit model deciphers my thoughts and sends it to GPT-7, which assigns each incoming task to a subagent. I look at the new plot, paragraph, and equations. I wonder whether spherical harmonics might be useful after all; Codex spins off a subagent. Convinced by the plot, I decide to make a quick slideshow with a prettified version showing only the baseline and top two lines, to show my teammates; Codex spins off a subagent.<br>I make myself coffee. My thoughts are mostly empty, but I briefly recall what I want to say to the candidate I’m getting lunch with tomorrow. In the background, Codex is prompted to think about info I might want for the lunch chat, and decides that updating the synthetic data scaling plot before showing it off would be prudent; Codex spins off a subagent.<br>( (<br>) )<br>.--------.<br>| |]<br>| COFFEE |<br>| |<br>'--------'<br>\____/<br>I'm not saying words really loudly in my head while getting coffee. I just read the plots as I normally do, and make coffee as I normally do. It feels like magic.
20302030 — Industry adapts and Conduit expandsThe AI companies now train their models to directly interface with Conduit’s latent representations. My encoded thoughts get sent directly to Codex, rather than having to pass through Conduit's decoder model first. That means I easily communicate thoughts that are hard to describe in text, like mental images.<br>I rarely go band-less when chatting with AIs these days. It's annoying, honestly, to go without. With the neural headband, I feel like I have superhuman powers over my laptop! Without it, I feel like I'm talking with a superpowered alien who's trying its best to be helpful but isn't sure what I want and is scared I'll get mad if it does something I don't want. Ugh.<br>Conduit continues to iterate on non-invasive read, but we’ve spun up two new efforts: invasive general read, and general write.
Most people are happy to stick with their neural bands, but a good number are excited to get higher fidelity reads via invasive tech.<br>More interesting is the recent excitement in writes. I feel superhuman in my control over my laptop. But my senses are still merely human. It's like if I could control my arms, but I'd lost all feeling in them. Yeah, I can still see my arms, and it's way better than not having arms, but it's still really odd. Like Ian Waterman. I want to feel what my Codex feels. Now that Conduit does general read, learning to do general write is many OOMs more data efficient.<br>More importantly, I want to unlock the other applications of write technology. I want to make my brain as efficient and neuroplastic as when I was 18.
20352035 — The AI is no longer “other”My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of...