AI Restores Speech, it's CPU's time, & Trump's Super AI Team

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week, we have news on curing muteness with AI, a 35-year-old tradition broken, Trump’s new AI super team, markets, and several new products, including a pretty incredible image-generation platform generating images in less than a second.

Enjoy!

BCIs

Using AI to Cure Muteness in ALS Patients

Through a new clinical trial, Neuralink has presented VOICE, a brain chip powered by AI that allows the recipient to “speak with their mind.”

The video shows the user, with its original voice (recovered from previous recordings again using AI), “speaking” using the system without moving the lips and mouth at all, just thinking what he wants to say. Pretty incredible.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

Truly outstanding technology. Brain-Computer interfaces, or BCIs, are one of the most exciting technologies in the AI spectrum. Interestingly, the idea is, at heart, very similar to other AIs like ChatGPT, mapping an input to an output.

However, this time, it’s not mapping a set of words to predict the next one, but processing brain signals (Neuralink uses invasive technology, meaning the chip is implanted in the brain), and learning which brain signals map to which actions.

Previously, Neuralink has made great progress in moving computer cursors with the mind, learning patterns like “whenever the brain activates in this way, the user is thinking about moving the cursor to the left,” and now it’s applying these same principles to speech.

But does this mean muteness is cured? Hardly, I’m afraid.

One issue with these “brain maps” is that each brain is unique. Unlike language, which is universal, the way your brain and mine activate for each thought is different. This means the AIs have to be “tuned” to the user in particular.

This also raises the question of whether there’s a foundational model of brain activations (a backbone you can fine-tune for each patient, like ChatGPT for each task) or whether the AIs are trained from scratch. This is an important question because it would give insight into how scalable this truly is.

Based on public data, we can be hopeful because it seems to be the former: they describe the process as “decoder calibration,” which suggests common patterns across brains and that the “only” thing to do is fine-tune (i.e., calibrate) to the patient.

Either way, I’m pretty sure that if AI news were more about this, rather than about superterminatorGPTClaude3000 about to obsolete millions of workers, the perception of the technology in our society would be much better.

CPUs

A First in 35 Years: ARM Announces First-Ever CPU

For the first time in its 35-year-old run, ARM has decided to ship its own chip, ARM AGI. Until now, ARM was an IP company; it licensed CPU designs (or, rather, Instruction Set Architectures), blueprints for others to design their own CPUs.

But now, it’s a chip company too. Why this sudden turn into a lower-margin business?

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

Do you need bigger proof that the CPU market is about to see an explosion in demand? Even…

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