23-Year-Old Chess Master Leaves OpenAI to Start Mind-Reading Startup

Naomi Bashkansky, a 23-year-old chess master, is leaving OpenAI to join Conduit as a founding scientist, a startup developing interfaces to turn thoughts into text. She predicts that within a few years, the primary way to communicate with AI will be through thoughts, and that by 2027, technology to decode thoughts will be available. Bashkansky holds chess titles and worked on OpenAI's safety team.

Naomi Bashkansky, a 23-year-old chess master, is leaving OpenAI to join Conduit as a founding scientist, a startup developing interfaces to turn thoughts into text. Bashkansky holds titles of World School Chess Champion for girls under 13 and North American Champion for girls under 20, as well as the FIDE title of Woman International Master (WIM). For the past year and a half, she worked as a researcher at OpenAI on the model safety and alignment team. Yesterday, she announced that two weeks ago she left OpenAI to join Conduit, which is unrelated to an Israeli company of the same name. According to her, by 2027, technology will be available that allows a user to wear a headband that decodes thoughts and converts them to text, and by 2030, AI companies will train their models to communicate directly with Conduit's technology. She wrote that her encoded thoughts are sent directly to Codex, and that she can easily communicate thoughts that are hard to capture in text, like a mental image. Bashkansky added that she believes in this vision because it builds toward a more humane future, where there is always a human in the loop and AI directly empowers humans rather than replacing them.