23-year-old chess master leaves OpenAI to launch a mind-reading startup
Naomi Bashkansky, a 23-year-old chess master and former OpenAI researcher, has joined the startup Conduit. The company is developing technology to convert human thoughts into text.
Chess master Naomi Bashkansky is leaving OpenAI to join the mind-reading startup Conduit as a founder. "It could be worth more than a trillion dollars," she said.
Bashkansky (23) holds titles as World School Chess Champion in the girls' under-13 category and North American Junior Girls' Champion under 20. She holds the title of Woman International Master (WIM) from the FIDE chess federation. For the past year and a half, she worked as a researcher at OpenAI on the model safety and alignment team.
On Wednesday, Bashkansky announced that she had left OpenAI two weeks ago to join Conduit (no relation to the Israeli company of the same name) as a founding scientist, which is developing interfaces to turn thoughts into text.
"My prediction is that within a few years, the primary way we talk to AI will be through our thoughts. They won't be an intern or a super-smart coworker you're desperately trying to keep up with. They will be a natural and fun extension of you," she wrote in a post explaining her decision.
According to her, by 2027, technology will be available that allows a user to wear a special headband capable of decoding thoughts and converting them into text. By 2030, AI companies will train their models to communicate directly with Conduit's technology.
"My encoded thoughts are sent directly to the codex. I can easily communicate thoughts that are hard to capture in text, like a mental image," she wrote. Bashkansky added: "I believe in this vision because it builds toward a more humane future. What super-humans will look like in 2035 depends directly on how super-human we, as a society, decide to make our AI. In this vision of the future, there is always a human in the equation, and AI directly empowers humans instead of replacing us."
