Meta might've done something useful, pioneering an AI model that can interpret brain activity into sentences with 80% accuracy
Depending on what areas of the internet you frequent, perhaps you were under the illusion that thoughts-to-text technology already existed; we all have that one mutual or online friend that we gently hope will perhaps one day post slightly less. Well, recently Meta has announced that a number of their research projects are coming together to form something that might even improve real people's lives—one day. Maybe!
Way back in 2017, Meta (at that time just called 'Facebook') talked a big game about “typing by brain.” Fast forward to now and Meta has shared news of two breakthroughs that make those earlier claims seem more substantial than a big sci-fi thought bubble (via MIT Technology Review). Firstly, Meta announced research that has created an AI model which «successfully decodes the production of sentences from non-invasive brain recordings, accurately decoding up to 80% of characters, and thus often reconstructing full sentences solely from brain signals.»
The second study Meta shared then examines how AI can facilitate a better understanding of how our brains slot the Lego bricks of language into place. For people who have lost the ability to speak after traumatic brain injuries, or who otherwise have complex communication needs, all of this scientific research could be genuinely life-changing. Unfortunately, this is where I burst the bubble: the 'non-invasive' device Meta used to record brain signals so that they could be decoded into text is huge, costs $2 million, and makes you look a bit like Megamind.
Dated reference to an animated superhero flick for children aside, Meta has been all about brain-computer interfaces for years. More recently they've even demonstrated a welcome amount of caution when it comes to the intersection of hard and 'wet' ware.
This time, the Meta Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab collaborated with the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, to record the brain signals of 35 healthy volunteers as they
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