In China they tested a hat that allows you to type without hands and without a chip in your head.
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Scientists from Guangxi and Tsinghua universities built new gel electrodes into a standard EEG cap. A person looks at the keyboard on the screen, electrodes read the brain's response and the computer recognizes the chosen character. The accuracy is more than 94%, the hat can be worn all day. But the process is very slow - maximum 20 characters per minute, while with hands on the keyboard - about 260.
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The Neuralink mask takes a different route: electrodes are implanted directly in the brain. A person utters a phrase mentally, the system turns brain signals into words: they appear on the screen and are heard out loud. The company recently reported that a patient with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - Stephen Hawking's disease) produced 75 words per minute in the first week with an error of 5.8% of the words. That's faster than the average person closes by hand. The target is 140 words per minute, the pace of a normal conversation.
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But that's not enough for Musk to restore speech to the paralyzed. He wants to expand the very channel of communication between people.
Through our eyes, ears and skin we receive a huge stream: images, sounds, sensations. According to Caltech scientists, the senses collect about a billion bits per second, and for stress, in words, a person emits about 10 bits. YouTube videos run at about 8 million bits per second. The human brain is a giant computer that receives streaming video, and its output is a telegraph: information flows out slowly, as if in Morse code, dots and dashes carefully tapped out.
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Musk describes our current communication like this: we have a complex picture in our head, a "mental video", and we compress it into a few words, and most of it is lost. He promises to increase the speeds from one bit per second to megabits and gigabits and achieve "consensual telepathy". We are talking about communication between a person with a chip and equipment, and between people who have chips. Without it, Musk believes, for super-fast AI, talking to a human would be "like talking to a tree."
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