Meta has an AI for brain typing, but it’s stuck in the lab

Back in 2017, Facebook unveiled plans for a brain-reading hat that you could use to text just by thinking. “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared in a post that year.  Now the company, since renamed Meta, has actually done it. Except it weighs a half a ton, costs $2 million, and won’t ever leave the lab.

Still, it’s pretty cool that neuroscience and AI researchers working for Meta have managed to analyze people’s brains as they type and determine what keys they are pressing, just from their thoughts.  According to Jean-Rémi King, leader of Meta’s “Brain & AI” research team, the system is able to determine what letter a skilled typist has pressed as much as 80% of the time, an accuracy high enough to reconstruct full sentences from the brain signals.

Facebook’s original quest for a consumer brain-reading cap or headband ran into technical obstacles, and after four years, the company scrapped the idea.  But Meta never stopped supporting basic research on neuroscience, something it now sees as an important pathway to more powerful AIs that learn and reason like humans. King says his group, based in Paris, is specifically tasked with figuring out “the principles of intelligence” from the human brain.  “Trying to understand the precise architecture or principles of the human brain could be a way to inform the development of machine intelligence,” says King. “That’s the path.”

Research on brain reading has been advancing quickly.  In 2023, for instance, a person who lost her voice from ALS was able to speak via brain-reading software connected to a voice synthesizer. Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, is testing its own brain implant that gives paralyzed people control over a cursor.