Former OpenAI researcher co-founds Conduit to develop mind-reading AI

Reading your thoughts before you type them sounds like science fiction. Conduit, a San Francisco startup, is betting it’s an engineering problem. Naomi Bashkansky, a Harvard computer science graduate and former OpenAI researcher, announced her departure from the AI lab in late July 2026 to join Conduit as a founding researcher. The company is building AI models that decode brain activity into text, without implanting anything in your skull. The announcement dropped on August 5, 2026, and it landed at an interesting moment. Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces have long played second fiddle to surgical approaches in the public imagination. Conduit is making the case that the non-invasive path, combined with enough data and good enough models, can close that gap. The dataset play Conduit claims to have built the world’s largest neuro-language dataset, approximately 10,000 hours of recordings collected from thousands of participants over just six months inside a dedicated San Francisco facility. As of December 2025, that figure reportedly dwarfs existing public neuro-language datasets in both size and complexity. The company collects this data using EEG, a non-invasive technique tha...