A Game You Can Control With Your Mind

Cade Metz of The New York Times testing the Neurable prototype. Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
Cade Metz of The New York Times testing the Neurable prototype. Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
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A Game You Can Control With Your Mind

Cade Metz of The New York Times testing the Neurable prototype. Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
Cade Metz of The New York Times testing the Neurable prototype. Credit Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

The increased interest in neurotechnology is partly a result of an effort the Obama administration started in 2013. The initiative helped create significant government financing for brain-interface companies and related work in academia. Then Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, began promoting the idea and his latest company, Neuralink. That combination has attracted the interest of private venture capital firms.

“With the smartphone, we’re starting to reach the limits of what we can do,” said Doug Clinton, the founder of Loup Ventures, a new venture capital firm that has invested in Neurable. “These companies are the next step.”

The Neurable prototype shows what is possible today. Using electroencephalography, or EEG — a means of measuring electrical brain activity that has been around for decades — the company can provide simple ways of mentally interacting with a game. Some companies hope to go much further, and want to build ways of performing nearly any computing task with the mind. Imagine a brain interface for rapidly typing on a smartphone.

Even for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mr. Musk, setting that goal pushes technological optimism to new heights. Some efforts seem particularly quixotic. Mr. Musk said in one interview that Neuralink planned to develop ways of implanting hardware in the skulls of completely healthy people.

At Neurable, which is based in Boston, Mr. Alcaide and the members of his team are pushing the limits of EEG headsets. Although sensors can read electrical brain activity from outside the skull, it is very difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Using computer algorithms based on research that Mr. Alcaide originally published as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, Neurable works to read activity with a speed and accuracy that is not usually possible.

The algorithms learn from your behavior. Before playing the game, you train them to recognize when you are focusing your attention on an object. A pulse of light bounces around the virtual room, and each time it hits a small colored ball in front of you, you think about the ball. At that moment, when you focus on the light and it stimulates your brain, the system reads the electrical spikes of your brain activity.

After you do this for a few minutes, the game learns to recognize when you are concentrating on an item. “We look at specific brain signals,” Mr. Alcaide said, “and once we understand them, we can use them.”

When you play the game, the same light bounces around the virtual room. When it hits the item you are thinking about, the system can identify the increase in brain activity.

The technique works with equipment that already exists. Neurable’s prototype uses virtual reality goggles from HTC, a consumer electronics company, and seven EEG sensors placed at specific spots around your head. But given the physical limits of what these sensors can read, an EEG-based game is unlikely to do more than slowly and simply select digital objects.

Some companies are working to move beyond that. Facebook, for example, is exploring methods for optically reading brain activity from outside the skull. Such a system would shine light into the brain to directly read chemical changes.

“What if you could type directly from your brain?” Regina Dugan of Facebook said this spring as she unveiled the company’s efforts to build this kind of optical interface. “It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you may realize.” In a few years, she said, Facebook hopes to have a system that allows people to type with their thoughts five times faster than they now type using a smartphone keyboard.

That is well beyond the realm of current research, and a number of neuroscientists question whether it will ever be possible, arguing that such speed will only come with devices planted inside the skull.

Several start-ups are now working to do just that. But some, including a Silicon Valley start-up called Paradromics, hope to do this as a way of treating people with medical conditions like blindness, deafness and paralysis.

Implanting hardware in the brain is dangerous, but the reward for patients could outweigh the risks. For companies like Paradromics, the goal is to significantly refine and expand the current methods, providing a faster and more complete way for patients to operate machines with their thoughts.

Mr. Musk’s Neuralink is moving in a similar direction, but the company’s ambitions appear to stretch much further, to eventually implanting chips in healthy people’s brains.

The dangers of brain surgery make this unlikely. But Mr. Boyden said there were some possibilities.

“I do find it implausible that an implant would go directly into the brain of someone with zero health problems,” he said. “But if companies take the right approach in helping people with the greatest need, then there may be a way for this to spread into people with less severe conditions, and then eventually become a kind of brain augmentation.”

Certainly, many of these projects will be met with skepticism. And Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm does not always mesh with the physical limitations of medicine and the human body.

“In the physical sciences, there are physical boundaries,” said Matt Angle, a neuroscientist and the founder of Paradromics. “To think that you’ll be able to blow through fundamental laws by sheer ambition and enthusiasm is naïve.”

(The New York Times)



Google Hires Windsurf Execs in $2.4 Billion Deal to Advance AI Coding Ambitions

FILE PHOTO: A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
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Google Hires Windsurf Execs in $2.4 Billion Deal to Advance AI Coding Ambitions

FILE PHOTO: A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: A Google logo is seen at a company research facility in Mountain View, California, US, May 13, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo

Alphabet's Google has hired several key staff members from AI code generation startup Windsurf, the companies announced on Friday, in a surprise move following an attempt by its rival OpenAI to acquire the startup.

Google is paying $2.4 billion in license fees as part of the deal to use some of Windsurf's technology under non-exclusive terms, according to a person familiar with the arrangement. Google will not take a stake or any controlling interest in Windsurf, the person added.

Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and some members of the coding tool's research and development team will join Google's DeepMind AI division, Reuters reported.

The deal followed months of discussions Windsurf was having with OpenAI to sell itself in a deal that could value it at $3 billion, highlighting the interest in the code-generation space which has emerged as one of the fastest-growing AI applications, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters in June.

OpenAI could not be immediately reached for a comment.

The former Windsurf team will focus on agentic coding initiatives at Google DeepMind, primarily working on the Gemini project.

"We're excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf's team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding," Google said in a statement.

The unusual deal structure marks a win for backers for Windsurf, which has raised $243 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks and General Catalyst, and was last valued at $1.25 billion one year ago, according to PitchBook.

Windsurf investors will receive liquidity through the license fee and retain their stakes in the company, sources told Reuters.

'ACQUIHIRE' DEALS

Google's surprise swoop mirrors its deal in August 2024 to hire key employees from chatbot startup Character.AI.

Big Tech peers, including Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, have similarly taken to these so-called acquihire deals, which some have criticized as an attempt to evade regulatory scrutiny.

Microsoft struck a $650 million deal with Inflection AI in March 2024, to use the AI startup's models and hire its staff, while Amazon hired AI firm Adept's co-founders and some of its team last June.

Meta took a 49% stake in Scale AI in June in the biggest test yet of this increasing form of business partnerships.

Unlike acquisitions that would give the buyer a controlling stake, these deals do not require a review by US antitrust regulators. However, they could probe the deal if they believe it was structured to avoid those requirements or harm competition. Many of the deals have since become the subject of regulatory probes.

The development comes as tech giants, including Alphabet and Meta, aggressively chase high-profile acquisitions and offer multi-million-dollar pay packages to attract top talent in the race to lead the next wave of AI.

Windsurf's head of business, Jeff Wang, has been appointed its interim CEO, and Graham Moreno, vice president of global sales, will be president, effective immediately.

The majority of Windsurf's roughly 250 employees will remain with the company, which has announced plans to prioritize innovation for its enterprise clients.