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OpenAI's venture capital arm and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund have invested in Coherence Neuro, a startup building a brain implant to detect and treat cancer, as part of a $45 million seed funding round. Coherence CEO Ben Woodington said the investment reflects growing alignment between AI labs and brain-computer interface developers, who view neural data as a valuable new data source for training models.
A new brain-computer interface has for the first time simultaneously decoded a paralyzed user's intended speech and movement, converting brain signals into on-screen text while animating a personalized avatar within seconds, according to a Nature Neuroscience study. Separately, a review published in Psychological Medicine finds that reading for pleasure correlates with structural brain changes, better mental health, and lower risk of cognitive decline, with benefits strongest when reading starts young and is enjoyable rather than obligatory.
Researchers at UC San Francisco tested a surgically implanted 253-electrode array that reads brain activity to simultaneously produce on-screen text and animate a personalized avatar's movements. The system, tested with two participants with severe paralysis, is described as the first brain-computer interface to handle verbal and non-verbal communication together within seconds of intent.