A woman in her 60s from Michigan had not spoken in years because of motor neuron disease. In a video clip played on the Moonshots podcast, she answers questions as her words are spelled out on a computer screen. The questions included advice for a long marriage and a farewell message to coworkers on retiring. Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University, said Matt Angle, the CEO of the brain-implant company Paradromics, had released the footage that week. Diamandis said Paradromics is one of his portfolio companies.
The demonstration started a conversation about a larger question. If a computer can read words from a person's brain, what should that connection be used for? The episode was recorded on October 13, 2026, and published two days later.
What a brain-computer interface does
A brain-computer interface, or BCI, records activity in the brain and turns it into something a computer can act on, such as text, synthesized speech or a command. Diamandis opened the segment with Ray Kurzweil's forecast that high-bandwidth BCIs would arrive by the mid-2030s. He counted at least a dozen well-funded companies working on them in 2026, including Neuralink and Paradromics.
Paradromics: an implant that turns thought into speech
Paradromics' device is called Connexus. Diamandis said it packs 421 microelectrodes into something the size of a quarter. According to Paradromics' description, the electrodes reach about 1.5 millimeters below the brain's surface and record the activity of individual neurons. A lead runs to a transceiver in the chest. An external receiver supplies power and sends the data to computers, where decoding software and language models turn it into text, synthesized speech or commands. The company describes Connexus as an investigational device for people with severe motor impairment. It reports real-time speech decoding in its first clinical participant.
Diamandis also gave a speed figure. He said the device reaches a data rate of 400 bits per second, 40 times higher than other BCIs and 10 times faster than the bit rate of human speech. Paradromics' own page states a different figure: an information transfer rate exceeding 200 bits per second, measured in preclinical testing rather than in a person.
Alexander Wissner-Gross, a computer scientist and founder of Reified, pointed listeners who were not watching to the screen, where the woman's words could be seen being spelled out.
Sabi: a cap instead of surgery
"So while Paradromics needs brain surgery," Diamandis said, "the next company wants to do it with a baseball cap." He described Sabi, a Palo Alto startup, as having raised a $50 million seed round led by the investor Vinod Khosla at a $600 million valuation. According to Diamandis, the cap is lined with 100,000 chip-scale EEG sensors, each 1 to 5 millimeters across. EEG, or electroencephalography, picks up the brain's electrical activity from outside the head. Diamandis said Sabi has built a brain foundation model, a large AI model trained on 100,000 hours of labeled neural data, to separate useful signal from noise and turn thoughts into prompts. He said the company aims to have the cap working by about the end of 2026, transcribing 30 words per minute at first.
Sabi's own page describes a wearable cap or beanie meant to turn thoughts and attempted speech into text and into interaction with AI agents. It requires no implant. The page describes custom sensors with footprints of about 1 millimeter, custom chips, large neural-imaging datasets and a brain foundation model. It presents the cap as a concept with a waitlist, not as a shipping product.
Diamandis quoted Khosla calling thought-to-computer input a "sexy idea" and said that typing is not natural. Then he made clear that a stronger phrase was his own: "I'll say typing is cooked." He recalled flying Stephen Hawking in zero gravity and said he would have loved for Hawking to have had this technology.
Less effort to show what you want
Salim Ismail, founder of Open ExO, said he would wear the cap. He brought up the old story that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow typists down. The more friction is removed "from thought to digital intent and material intent," he said, the faster everything moves. Diamandis said the cap was voice dictation "on steroids" and that he has stopped typing and uses a dictation tool for all his input.
Dave Blundin: the flow may reverse
Dave Blundin, founder and general partner of Link Ventures, expected events to unfold differently from what his friends who worked on BCIs had pictured. Their vision, he said, was that you could extend your mind into the internet and become far more productive than someone without the connection. Your brain would be the source of ideas, and the interface would carry them out in the world.
Blundin argued that AI is moving too fast for that picture. People are already directing hundreds or thousands of AI agents at once, programs that carry out tasks on their own, and he called that "mentally overwhelming anyway." He expects agents to report back with compelling video and audio explaining what they are doing, and he said that would happen in the next few months. "In reality, it's inverting," he said. "The ideas are coming from the A.I. back to you far, far faster than anyone would have thought." He said the interface would "certainly help the impaired tremendously," but that its purpose as an extension for everyone else needs rethinking. He called his own view "all just speculation."
The brain as the cloud's motivator
Wissner-Gross said Blundin's reversal fits the history of how the brain evolved. The neocortex, the outer layer behind much of human reasoning, was motivated by limbic system components that evolved earlier. The limbic system handles emotion and drives. He asked Diamandis, who holds a medical degree, to keep him honest on this point. By the same logic, he said, the human brain could become "the limbic system for your exocortex that runs in the cloud," at least in the short term before "we all upload."
Diamandis offered a different picture. The corpus callosum connects the brain's left and right halves, and he imagined adding another hemisphere: the cloud. He said the brain has about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections but cannot grow any larger, because a bigger head could not pass through the birth canal. He and Wissner-Gross briefly pointed to growing babies outside the womb as a way to allow bigger brains.
Restoration before replacement
Ismail said people have already moved part of their minds outside their heads, since much of their memory now lives on their phones. He recalled Neil Jacobstein saying that a neocortex spread flat would be about the size and thickness of a dinner napkin. AI, Ismail said, can make it the size of a tablecloth or a carpet.
Then he returned to the woman in the clip and to Hawking. He called the demonstration "such an amazing example of AI delivering human restoration rather than human replacement." Communication, he said, is central to freedom, dignity and autonomy: "We are restoring that woman's humanity." Public debate focuses on AI replacing people, he said, but he finds helping people recover lost abilities more inspiring.
Forks in the road
Diamandis credited Wissner-Gross with an idea he has held onto: humans are largely static while AI grows extremely fast. In that view, people will have to choose between coupling with AI, through BCIs or uploading, and getting left behind. Diamandis said he has written about these "human forks" and called them fundamental decisions society will face within our lifetimes.
Wissner-Gross expected people to choose all of them at once. Some subcultures would try BCIs, he said, some would become what he called "Borganisms," and some would attempt pure uploading. He called the result "a cognitive Cambrian explosion where every possible form of human-machine merger gets tried all at once."