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Junk_Collector 1 days ago [-]
It's worth noting that this isn't new technology. This paper is specifically about how their new technique provides a small but statistically significant improvement on existing techniques.
The fact that they provide code and dataset is really praiseworthy.
bpiche 1 days ago [-]
I still think of this video often and wonder if it is building on any of that technology, almost 10 years old now. Just looking at this whitepaper it seems like they both use some kind of infrared transcranial light, but never imagined the machine in the original iteration was so big
[Regina Dugan's Keynote at Facebook F8 2017 | Inverse]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCDWKdmwhUI
alexpotato 1 days ago [-]
So attended an interesting talk a couple years ago:
- fMRI and/or brain implants are the best to figure out brain waves
- but they are expensive or invasive
- EEG is a lot cheaper and easier but not as precise
- BUT what if you used LLMs to analyze EEG data taken at the same time as brain implants etc
The answer seemed to be that "yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs". Curious to see where this ends up and hopefully not that like that Black Mirror episode with the brain scanning leading to murders.
Honali 16 hours ago [-]
If these systems ever become good enough to be useful, the privacy and consent questions need to be treated as core engineering requirements, not as a policy afterthought
> “yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs"
Not yet. There are plenty of transformer based models out there for EEG but they so far do not outperform the SOTA “traditional” (ML/DL) models.
consumer451 1 days ago [-]
Please see my bio for the full rant. The key take-away is:
> While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking.
> Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding...
ygouzerh 21 hours ago [-]
It's good point! However, one of the main benefits of a technology like this, would be not really for everyday people, but for people with handicap or a speech impediment.
I personally have a stammer. While mine is less severe, and I doesn't need directly it, I know several people that would quite be glad of the benefits that it could bring to them. (Example: pass online interviews).
I agree however of the privacy concerns. We could limit it in a first time to medical devices for example, or have some privacy laws in place.
consumer451 8 hours ago [-]
I totally respect that, and it would be really cool technology in general. However, it is truly last frontier of privacy. We can't just treat this as yet another little thing.
smusamashah 1 days ago [-]
This is the most pessimistic take on this tech here. You can view anything with the same lens.
consumer451 24 hours ago [-]
I ain't young. I have seen this all play out before. It's just extrapolating based on what we did with cookies, browsing history, cell tower data, etc... unless we pass very strict neural privacy laws, why wouldn't it go the same way?
The decent news is that if you search "neural privacy laws," you will find some states are already on top of it, a bit. We need national laws, in every country ASAP. This needs to happen before there are billions in economic inertia behind BCIs.
moolcool 22 hours ago [-]
I’m trying to not be snarky here, but it is difficult to have an optimistic take about an advertising company working on mind reading technology. At some point we have to call a spade a spade, I think.
Georgelemental 23 hours ago [-]
The way to not get the most pessimistic outcome is to work for a better one, and to do that you have to first recognize the danger
otikik 16 hours ago [-]
I agree in that it is pessimistic. I strongly doubt it is the most pessimistic take.
rcxdude 18 hours ago [-]
You should probably view anything meta does through the same lens. They can make great tech but they utterly ruin it with their creepiness.
trueno 18 hours ago [-]
at this point i feel like its just painfully obvious that if this for whatever became feasible/widespread/scalable, it would absolutely be implemented by the powers that be and willed into fruition by gaslighting, fear mongering and misinformation. i dont know how much more proof this world needs that ruling classes can and do want to just subjugate the hell out of everyone & enforce their world view on the world around them
ImPostingOnHN 24 hours ago [-]
Saying "this is the most pessimistic take" doesn't make for good discussion.
Something can have "good takes" but still run an unacceptable risk of ending badly
rubyfan 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, Meta focusing on this type of research does set off alarm bells for me. I suspect this isn’t about some altruistic intention to help people with disabilities but something a little more surveillance oriented.
consumer451 7 hours ago [-]
Imagine the ad profile data value that this would unlock. CPC - > Cost per thought?
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected signs of depression. Full court press on all ad partners aiming for that group.
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected that this user pictures driving fast, our insurance partners have the user profile updated.
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected signs of <insert any fleeting thought that you would never act upon> - as required by local regulations, they are now labeled by the state as <that>.
consumer451 4 hours ago [-]
Apologies, "CPC - > Cost per thought?" was very sloppy.
It's an improvement in CPA or ROAS.
plastic-enjoyer 17 hours ago [-]
While I share your privacy concerns, one should also ask how realistic such a scenario is with non-invasive BCIs due to their limited nature. It does not mean that neural tracking isn't possible with this technology, however, I would question if this technology is feasible for consumer products and wide adaptation.
zuzululu 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure whether to be worried or not and I am not talking about whatever you wrote but for your own sake , it seems to be extremely paranoid style of writing
consumer451 22 hours ago [-]
It is impossible not to sound like a kook when discussing this topic.
I think anyone in 1995, who was accurately predicting our current state of privacy would have sounded like a paranoid lunatic as well.
rushil_b_patel 19 hours ago [-]
Mark always been framed/stated for stealing user's data or invasing user's privacy but apart from these, this guy has always been one step ahead in making new research, technology possible by experimenting new things. First with the AR/VR which didn't work I guess so he pivoted from that to Rayban glasses, and now this.
wwind123 19 hours ago [-]
The "Metaverse" bet was a bold but lost bet, in hindsight. Mark is fortunate that the Facebook empire is still printing a lot of money to burn, so he could switch his focus to AI now that it's clear AI is the real thing for this decade. This brain-wave thing is a very small wrinkle in the big picture, not really a big strategy shift.
19 hours ago [-]
celltalk 17 hours ago [-]
As far as I understand the underlying model is not multimodal. Maybe a quite naive question but can't we improve the performance by a joint embedding of EEG and MEG data? If it scales with log-linear data, maybe it would also improve with other data as well.
Honali 16 hours ago [-]
My guess is that multimodal training could be useful as a pretraining strategy
I'm excited to see what happens when there's enough data, will it show the same kind of progress just like GPT does.
t_gamer_kle 1 days ago [-]
And you reverse it to go from words to brain waves! Mind reading at a distance.
smath 22 hours ago [-]
Are they trying to infer characters/words from brain waves? I would have thought the brain is thinking in concepts rather than actual words
nok22kon 21 hours ago [-]
no contradiction, both can be true, you think in concepts, then verbalize, which is what they capture
whimsicalism 1 days ago [-]
Interesting -- really excited for the future of human-brain interfaces and just in general more interface exploration enabled by large transformers. I'm already very excited by voice, although wish I could get something akin to the subvoc common in scifi novels. Seems like it would be an easier path than human-brain and would allow me to use voice models in public.
As an aside, disappointed by the very low quality of comments on this article here.
JohnMakin 10 hours ago [-]
(literal) thought crimes, coming soon to a place near you by Meta
LowLevelKernel 24 hours ago [-]
There were alpha block classes
hackermeows 1 days ago [-]
why is there no live demo? Anyone seen this in action? Can someone share a demo video or something
ge96 1 days ago [-]
The size of that machine
fjlunky 21 hours ago [-]
I imagine you’re wanting instead something the size of a hat, but smaller fMRI are certainly in development, for example [0] with discussion about the size at [1].
The participants end up looking a bit like Toad from Mariokart.
How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?
Sanzig 21 hours ago [-]
Not my field, but since they use SQUIDs I suspect most of the volume is taken up by cryo equipment. So, maybe if someone eventually discovers a room temperature superconductor.
slipperybeluga 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
jeffbee 1 days ago [-]
Patients should get a "My other hat is a superconducting quantum interferometer" hat.
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
Reminds me of the scene in series Incorporated where a megacorp uses this sort of tech to interrogate an employee from a competitor mega-corp to get at a trade secret.
It's a little spooky how real that could now be. Oh and that series was a dystopian series because ofc it was
mpenick 1 days ago [-]
Now the remaining problem is to make Magnetoencephalography devices affordable and not insanely huge.
The ultrasound technique there is more like MRI, static imaging, not measuring dynamic electrical signals. Also, regardless of static vs moving, all of this hinges on massive relatively expensive devices (ultrasound is never going to be dirt cheap or miniaturized compared to a smartwatch or even a VR headset) and for the subject to remain perfectly still and probably go through regular calibration sequences. All for <75% accuracy on simple classification tasks. The information mixes in the propagation out of the skull, erasing information. It's analogous to trying to do a row hammer attack on a CPU from outside the computer case.
Also, in the Meta result here, "while actively typing" is actually quite different than passive mind reading because the motor cortex sits nicely near the top surface of the skull, and the muscle memory from past typing makes for a nice well formed signal to measure and classify. It's the same trick over and over since the Brown BrainGate days where you can have people perform or imagine movements and get a decent but not good classification result, and it never gets much better after that trick is exploited. Project dies, VCs and grant writers forget or never appreciated the effect, time goes by, a grad student or corporate research lackey rediscovers it, media puts out an article claiming mind reading is here, and the cycle repeats...
GaggiX 1 days ago [-]
Someone should try it while sleeping and see if anything is related to a dream.
iwassayinbourns 1 days ago [-]
This wouldn’t work. Apart from it being very difficult to get people to sleep deeply enough for them to dream in machines like this, the brain state is very different whilst asleep compared with awake. Also the data generated from typing would be very different than thought since it’s likely picking up on broad electrical activity in the primary motor cortex.
Source: spouse works in a sleep lab studying dreams with MRI
ASTP001 1 days ago [-]
what sleep lab does your spouse work at? i'm curious about studying dreams
Rekindle8090 1 days ago [-]
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dclavijo 1 days ago [-]
great news!, I would like to conversate with my dog...i'm sure he has more important thing than lots of people
voxelghost 1 days ago [-]
Now, your dogs may very well be smarter than mine. But here's how I imagine a convo with my dogs would go.
- Let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!
Ok, friend, here you go. - opens door.
- Wow super cool, now let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!
ksd482 1 days ago [-]
If one were to go about translating brain waves from dogs to meaning, we'd run into a big problem immediately: vocabulary resolution.
What I mean by that is we'll have a very limited number of words to which a dog's brainwaves can be translated to since we aren't able to understand them beyond their basic instincts of food, survival, fear, affection towards their owner etc.
There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.
I do wonder how animals think. Perhaps this resolution would also be the theoretical maximum?
supern0va 1 days ago [-]
>There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.
There are many dogs that have been trained to press buttons corresponding to words, in the extreme case tens/hundreds of buttons/words, and they can even construct rudimentary sentences. It doesn't seem insane to me that we could perhaps do a very rudimentary version of this for dogs, given a large enough training set.
gloyoyo 1 days ago [-]
Some important ones like, "earthquake", "Seizure", etc...
Might be of use.
yieldcrv 1 days ago [-]
but that's imposing our language on them, when we should be understanding them
there's a movie about that default human hubris, it spoils it though
ksd482 21 hours ago [-]
That's a great point.
The "vocabulary resolution being low" basically just means within our own limited context, it's low. But that doesn't mean it's a good measure. Heck, I'd say it isn't.
righthand 1 days ago [-]
Does your dog want to converse with you or anyone?
Honali 17 hours ago [-]
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sometimelurker 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dang 1 days ago [-]
[stub for offtopicness]
p.s. come on you guys - this is not what HN is for. You may not owe $megacorp better but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
999900000999 1 days ago [-]
Feels like the premise for a spy comedy with a protagonist whose mind can’t be read.
When the bad guys try they just get the lyrics to Yoko Ono music.
moolcool 1 days ago [-]
It'll be a cold day in hell before Meta gets access to my brainwaves. Good heavens, can you imagine?
kibwen 1 days ago [-]
I'm glad that, with any luck, I'll be dead before this kind of thing is commonplace.
vlian2088 1 days ago [-]
2034: brainwave readers are now production-ready
2035: every phone comes with one so you can can do things without clicking any yucky buttons
2036: China mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and promote social harmony. EU and US condemn. the media condemns.
2037: the EU mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and fight malinformation. the media applauds.
2038: the US, ruled by the blue party, mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat white nationalism. the red party condemns.
2039: the US, now ruled by the red party, abolishes the previous law and introduces a new one, mandating phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat illegal immigration. the blue party condemns.
tantalor 1 days ago [-]
Do they test against people not in their training cohort?
setnone 1 days ago [-]
non-invasive tech from meta? i don't buy that
fooker 1 days ago [-]
@dang How is this offtopic?
Meta has shown remarkable disregard to users' and employees' privacy.
Why should that not come up when discussing an entirely new dystopian technology that allows them to invade privacy at scale?
dang 23 hours ago [-]
The topic is research into brain-wave decoding.
To take some specific piece of research going on in one corner of $BigCorp, and tar it with the brush of general sentiment about $BigCorp, is a classic example of generic tangent: where the topic goes from something specific-and-more-interesting, to something generic-and-more-indignant. We've learned over the years that this is exactly the wrong direction for HN threads to head in. Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
fooker 19 hours ago [-]
It's not a 'general sentiment' or tangent though, it's specifically THE technology that has the potential to make privacy nonexistent.
Funded by the company that in the recent past, got exposed trying to track employees computer interactions and grabbing screens. Not long before that, it was leaked that employees and contractors were watching videos recorded from meta/rayban smartglasses.
I'm a little bit baffled by the defense here. The point of having guidelines is to use your judgement when applying them.
dang 8 hours ago [-]
I brought up the "generic tangent" guideline because this was a case of how small/specific topics tend to get sucked into the gravity field of big/generic ones, leading to less interesting discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Not only that but less-interesting discussion is usually more-indignant, which makes sense when discussion abandons the actual content of an article (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So we end up losing along two axes: loss of information and rise of inflammation.
botfriendsarent 1 days ago [-]
I tried it all it said was "Hot or not?" before it crashed
TheOtherHobbes 1 days ago [-]
A word recondition ration of 78% is still petty poop.
dang 1 days ago [-]
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
I can actually see this happening someday. Theoretical physicists could charge thousands of dollars an hour.
throwawalien 1 days ago [-]
if you think they're going to pay people for their data you haven't been paying attention
they'll just put it buried on page 450 of the meta glasses 3 or something
UltraSane 1 days ago [-]
They are already paying scarce labor like medical doctors and lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to create training data. The RoI for training data is high because it can be used to train many models.
fooker 1 days ago [-]
Coming soon to a Meta office near you: brain-scanning to make sure employees are focused, happy, and productive!
There are no layoffs in Ba Sing Se.
celeries 1 days ago [-]
If this happens, I'll be listening to music with the most annoying lyrics on repeat.
androiddrew 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
1970-01-01 1 days ago [-]
The dystopian future will use this to get passwords/passphrases.
LPisGood 1 days ago [-]
Wouldn’t a wrench work just as well?
1970-01-01 1 days ago [-]
No, the wrench only works as a threat. Once you beat the brains out of someone, you can't try again.
sublinear 1 days ago [-]
It's much easier to resist torture.
iLoveOncall 1 days ago [-]
The future is dark.
egypturnash 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 23 hours ago [-]
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
Imagine the shareholder value if he could just beam ads directly in to your brain.
johnsmith1840 1 days ago [-]
Lightspeed briefs, for the discriminating crotch!
emsign 21 hours ago [-]
I hate this because we have crazy billionaires who want to abuse this technology. But apart from tht it's pretty cool, though I hate that it's being developed in this dark day and age. Miserable times.
The fact that they provide code and dataset is really praiseworthy.
- fMRI and/or brain implants are the best to figure out brain waves
- but they are expensive or invasive
- EEG is a lot cheaper and easier but not as precise
- BUT what if you used LLMs to analyze EEG data taken at the same time as brain implants etc
The answer seemed to be that "yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs". Curious to see where this ends up and hopefully not that like that Black Mirror episode with the brain scanning leading to murders.
Not yet. There are plenty of transformer based models out there for EEG but they so far do not outperform the SOTA “traditional” (ML/DL) models.
> While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking.
> Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding...
I personally have a stammer. While mine is less severe, and I doesn't need directly it, I know several people that would quite be glad of the benefits that it could bring to them. (Example: pass online interviews).
I agree however of the privacy concerns. We could limit it in a first time to medical devices for example, or have some privacy laws in place.
The decent news is that if you search "neural privacy laws," you will find some states are already on top of it, a bit. We need national laws, in every country ASAP. This needs to happen before there are billions in economic inertia behind BCIs.
Something can have "good takes" but still run an unacceptable risk of ending badly
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected signs of depression. Full court press on all ad partners aiming for that group.
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected that this user pictures driving fast, our insurance partners have the user profile updated.
While allowing the user to type with their mind, we detected signs of <insert any fleeting thought that you would never act upon> - as required by local regulations, they are now labeled by the state as <that>.
It's an improvement in CPA or ROAS.
I think anyone in 1995, who was accurately predicting our current state of privacy would have sounded like a paranoid lunatic as well.
As an aside, disappointed by the very low quality of comments on this article here.
[0] https://med.umn.edu/news/university-minnesota-developing-com...
[1] https://designawards.core77.com/Strategy-Research/95329/A-ne...
How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?
It's a little spooky how real that could now be. Oh and that series was a dystopian series because ofc it was
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48685558
Also, in the Meta result here, "while actively typing" is actually quite different than passive mind reading because the motor cortex sits nicely near the top surface of the skull, and the muscle memory from past typing makes for a nice well formed signal to measure and classify. It's the same trick over and over since the Brown BrainGate days where you can have people perform or imagine movements and get a decent but not good classification result, and it never gets much better after that trick is exploited. Project dies, VCs and grant writers forget or never appreciated the effect, time goes by, a grad student or corporate research lackey rediscovers it, media puts out an article claiming mind reading is here, and the cycle repeats...
Source: spouse works in a sleep lab studying dreams with MRI
- Let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!
Ok, friend, here you go. - opens door.
- Wow super cool, now let's go see what's on the other side of this door, friend, maybe there's food !!
What I mean by that is we'll have a very limited number of words to which a dog's brainwaves can be translated to since we aren't able to understand them beyond their basic instincts of food, survival, fear, affection towards their owner etc.
There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.
I do wonder how animals think. Perhaps this resolution would also be the theoretical maximum?
There are many dogs that have been trained to press buttons corresponding to words, in the extreme case tens/hundreds of buttons/words, and they can even construct rudimentary sentences. It doesn't seem insane to me that we could perhaps do a very rudimentary version of this for dogs, given a large enough training set.
Might be of use.
there's a movie about that default human hubris, it spoils it though
The "vocabulary resolution being low" basically just means within our own limited context, it's low. But that doesn't mean it's a good measure. Heck, I'd say it isn't.
p.s. come on you guys - this is not what HN is for. You may not owe $megacorp better but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
When the bad guys try they just get the lyrics to Yoko Ono music.
2035: every phone comes with one so you can can do things without clicking any yucky buttons
2036: China mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and promote social harmony. EU and US condemn. the media condemns.
2037: the EU mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and fight malinformation. the media applauds.
2038: the US, ruled by the blue party, mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat white nationalism. the red party condemns.
2039: the US, now ruled by the red party, abolishes the previous law and introduces a new one, mandating phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat illegal immigration. the blue party condemns.
Meta has shown remarkable disregard to users' and employees' privacy.
Why should that not come up when discussing an entirely new dystopian technology that allows them to invade privacy at scale?
To take some specific piece of research going on in one corner of $BigCorp, and tar it with the brush of general sentiment about $BigCorp, is a classic example of generic tangent: where the topic goes from something specific-and-more-interesting, to something generic-and-more-indignant. We've learned over the years that this is exactly the wrong direction for HN threads to head in. Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
Funded by the company that in the recent past, got exposed trying to track employees computer interactions and grabbing screens. Not long before that, it was leaked that employees and contractors were watching videos recorded from meta/rayban smartglasses.
I'm a little bit baffled by the defense here. The point of having guidelines is to use your judgement when applying them.
Not only that but less-interesting discussion is usually more-indignant, which makes sense when discussion abandons the actual content of an article (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So we end up losing along two axes: loss of information and rise of inflammation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Better than text-stripping the internet - this thing will soon be pulling the logits as well.
"Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. The post was obviously bullish / optimistic on the technical capabilities. Not in the least dismissive.
2. The economics extrapolation is obvious. See current precedent for paid access for purchased screen-casts of dev work: https://pdoom.org/open_calls/04_crowd_cast.html
they'll just put it buried on page 450 of the meta glasses 3 or something
There are no layoffs in Ba Sing Se.