--- title: Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy | daily.dev description: A former OpenAI alignment researcher announces her move to Conduit, a startup building non-invasive thought-to-text (brain-computer interface) technology. She... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-m-leaving-openai-to-build-telepathy-5vhktgaxm twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy | daily.dev og:description: A former OpenAI alignment researcher announces her move to Conduit, a startup building non-invasive thought-to-text (brain-computer interface) technology. She... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-m-leaving-openai-to-build-telepathy-5vhktgaxm og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/5VhktgAXM.png og:image:alt: Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 12 min read · 0 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary A former OpenAI alignment researcher announces her move to Conduit, a startup building non-invasive thought-to-text (brain-computer interface) technology. She outlines a vision for 2027–2035 where neural headbands allow users to control AI agents like Codex through thought alone, progressing from noisy text decoding to full bidirectional brain-AI integration. The technical approach applies scaling laws to non-invasive neural data collection, drawing parallels to how speech-to-text and LLMs improved with more data. She explains her reasons for joining: belief in the trillion-dollar market potential, the founding team's quality, and the breadth of open research problems compared to her narrower role at OpenAI. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 203 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-09-14). **TL;DR:** The community is overwhelmingly skeptical and alarmed, viewing the post as a mix of naive techno-utopianism, dangerous privacy implications, and marketing hype — with very few voices expressing genuine excitement about the technology's potential. **Sentiment:** 8% positive · 12% mixed · 80% skeptical **The case for** - Some commenters acknowledge legitimate use cases for people with locked-in syndrome or communication disabilities. - A minority find the prospect of thought-speed interaction with computers genuinely exciting and empowering. - The technical approach of applying scaling laws to non-invasive neural data is seen by a few as at least plausible in direction. **The pushback** - Commenters widely fear that thought-reading technology would be weaponized for surveillance, interrogation, or state coercion. - Many view the 2027–2035 timeline as wildly unrealistic, especially for non-invasive approaches which are seen as technically inferior to invasive BCIs. - The vision of AI writing back into the brain is described as dystopian, evoking Black Mirror comparisons and fears of thought manipulation. - Several commenters question whether the author's youth and elite-track background insulate her from understanding the real-world consequences of such technology. - The framing of the technology as 'telepathy' is criticized as marketing exaggeration disconnected from what's actually being built. - Concerns raised that private thoughts could become monetizable data or training material for AI companies. - The broader SV/rationalist culture around this kind of announcement is criticized as cult-like and detached from reality. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Deeply critical across nearly all threads — privacy fears, technical skepticism about non-invasive approaches, dystopian analogies, and mockery of the author's grandiose framing dominate, with only isolated voices defending the technology's potential. **Hottest debate:** Whether the author's enthusiasm reflects genuine visionary thinking or dangerous naivety enabled by elite insulation from consequences — and whether describing the experience of AI as a 'sixth sense' constitutes a kind of psychosis. **Open questions** - How would users prevent involuntary or private thoughts from being captured and transmitted to an AI or third parties? - Is non-invasive neural data collection actually capable of achieving the fidelity needed for reliable thought-to-text, or is this fundamentally limited without invasive implants? - What legal frameworks, if any, would protect individuals from state or corporate misuse of thought-reading technology? - How does the system handle people with no internal monologue, given that training data relies on speech/typing correlates? **Highlights** > My thoughts being beamed to a frontier model where they are monetizable (and used for training) is terrifying. > — [mcfdoesdev on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187085) > That's easily solved! The Conduit® Thinkerface® Pro Band will contain a small 90B dense local model that pre-screens your Conduit® NeuroTokens® stream for compliance against the Conduit® Acceptable Usage Policy applicable for your region and subscription tier. If non-compliance is detected you'll be promptly notified via a small current applied to the Conduit® ThinkRight® Human Training Electrodes embedded within your band. Intensity and duration are dynamically adjusted until compliance is restored. Even better, because this all happens on-device before your Conduit® NeuroTokens® are sent to the Conduit® NeuroServer®, non-compliant thoughts don't count towards your Conduit® Daily Thinking Allowance or expend credits from your Conduit® Additional Thinking Purchase Plan. > — [komadori on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49188735) > With some technologies, the negatives are so severe it is difficult to see how they outweigh the positives. Mind-control technology is quite frankly just asking to be abused. It's the ultimate relinquishment of power - you reveal your entire hand to someone else AND let them do what they want with it. I honestly don't understand how some people are so optimistic that they think this technology won't be misused in ways that massively overshadow the good that could be done with them. > — [dag100 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187619) > There has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning. And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live. On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond. > — [kunai on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189401) > I feel the complete opposite. Years ago I was close to disavowing technology and only doing the minimal effort needed to keep up with my job, because I'd gotten bored and disillusioned with it. Anything more than a small hobby project had accumulated too much complexity and busywork for me to feel excited about working on it. I suffered through it for the sake of the few things I cared about most, but it took its toll on me. I didn't have the infinite energy I may have had for my favorite projects in high school anymore. But then this new wave of AI came along. First there was Copilot, and I was in awe not necessarily at its immediate practicality, but the potential it demonstrated. I felt the embers of passion tentatively peek their heads out from wherever I'd previously buried them. Every new leap, computing became more and more rewarding again. First general searches became incredibly easier to find the relevant bits I wanted from. I actually wanted to look things up again now that I didn't have to grok dozens of pages of Google or Stack Overflow. I got my custom home router configured the way I wanted it instead of giving up or settling for copying some known config that wasn't quite what I wanted, after a small amount of trial and error. Then it became reasonably competent at simple but tedious tasks, at least 90% where the last 10% was easy to fix by hand. Enormous git conflict to slog through? Instead of staring at the screen feeling my heart sink and wandering off to bedrot instead, I felt excited at the prospect that I could instead command the computer to do it for me, and it was actually motivating to get that to work. Instead of feeling too exhausted and annoyed to keep working, I felt rewarded and refreshed. Then it started writing entire code files, then entire features, then entire applications all on its own, with my guidance and input on architectural decisions and aesthetics. Performing entire FreeBSD upgrades while keeping custom kernel module packages working, fixing Gentoo systems with messed up USE flags and an otherwise intractable dependency hell to sift through, hell, even writing entire kernel patches to fix sleep mode and graphics problems I'd been having on my 2010 Macbook Pro with Gentoo installed. I feel something reminiscent of my memories of opening Christmas presents as a child when the AI is done making something I'm super excited for. I'm eternally grateful for the current AI zeitgeist in the tech world. We're living in the best time so far in history to be into tech. And things like Conduit? How would you not be excited for something with so much potential to be made? Even if you don't like it, imagine what it could mean for people with communication disabilities, carpal tunnel, etc. I'd love to be able to just type with my thoughts, and sending them straight into an AI sounds awesome too. If this is satanic then I don't want to go to heaven. I feel more joy, excitement, and liberatory potential in technology than I have at any point in my life. I even feel more liberated to learn more - without the tedium raising my cortisol and stealing my attention all day, I'm actually more inclined to do things like write code in vim on my VT320 or read over code there with no distractions or AI input. I've reaped great rewards from being able to think more clearly and at higher levels of abstraction, free of the bonds of bullshit and tedium, at peace in the knowledge that I will never have to shave a yak against my will ever again. > — [jimmaswell on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49190198) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185370) · 104 points · 203 comments ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@matchpoint** · 0 upvotes > Good luck > >  ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully](https://daily.dev/posts/mira-murati-steps-back-into-the-spotlight-carefully-uhf5rerft) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Mira Murati resurfaces with AI governance warning, new product](https://daily.dev/posts/mira-murati-resurfaces-with-ai-governance-warning-new-product-ng3ndieiu) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#brain-computer-interface](https://daily.dev/tags/brain-computer-interface) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-m-leaving-openai-to-build-telepathy-5vhktgaxm) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-m-leaving-openai-to-build-telepathy-5vhktgaxm","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-m-leaving-openai-to-build-telepathy-5vhktgaxm"},"datePublished":"2026-08-05T18:45:57.852Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T07:28:51.896Z","description":"A former OpenAI alignment researcher announces her move to Conduit, a startup building non-invasive thought-to-text (brain-computer interface) technology. 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