EB-2: Organic Holodeck

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EB-2, our second podcast, dropped last week. Before I continue, the rules of the game are:

• Pods that CHART stays alive

• Pods that get a Follow on Apple Podcasts CHART

So FIRST, CLICK on the link below (opens up your Apple Podcasts app), and click “+Follow” (in the upper right-hand corner)

Then go ahead and listen to the podcast any way you want to on your preferred app, capiche mon ami?

Listen on

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Youtube

• RSS

Who

Eric Wollberg (LinkedIn), CEO, and Wes Louis (LinkedIn) CTO, founders of PropheticAI, a consumer neurotech startup backed by The Box Group, OSV, a16z, Shrug VC, Space Cadet Venture, and others.

When

Feb 20, 2024

Background

Imagine you wake up from a dream. Everything is real. And then you conjure up a tree, your late grandparent, and a samovar of tea. And proceed to have a long-lost reunion.

That’s what lucid dreaming is, the ability to interact in the dream world, with full consciousness and agency. Prophetic AI is building this, nearing launch of its lucid dreaming headband, and is looking for beta test volunteers.

Potentially, the headband could also induce other discrete states:

• Focus

• Positive Mood

• Meditation

• Inebriation (?)

You could have an app store, where you just buy the next neural experience. The product roadmap leads to the “mass production of conscious experience” and replication of “qualia”, the feeling of someone else experience something.

What is it really?

• Its a headband

• It reads brain signals using an electroencephalogram (EEG)

• The EEG image is fed into an AI model. That model then generates an image of a pattern of sound waves that the model predicts will put your mind in an altered state

• The headband generates those sound waves (transcranial-focused ultrasound)

• You get altered

While it all sounds very woo, it seems like the technology and the science are actually reaching maturity right now, with a combination of:

• EEG miniaturization

• ultrasound transducer miniaturization and resolution

• EEG and fMRI data availability

• transformer AI models

• lucid dreaming entering the fringe of the mainstream

Earlier generations of ultrasound stimulation, which used hammer size low-resolution stimulation defined by regression models, achieved impressive if inconsistent results:

And lucid dreaming, of course, is only the first of many states of consciousness we might be interested in inducing. Prophetic is currently only using a 100 million parameter AI model it compares to GPT-1… so you have to wonder what happens in 5 years when they get to a trillion parameter model.

Prophetic has a good amount of research linked here.

Transcripts

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Links

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