Even as the world still reels in its attempt to understand and absorb the ripples from the launch of ChatGPT and assorted AI-based systems — whose dust will take a long while to settle — scientists are carrying on with their own applications of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and LLM (Large Language Models). And according to Scientific American, one of the latest such applications is a GPT-based model that takes its prompts not from human text, but directly from the users' mind.
Developed by a research team with the University of Texas at Austin, and published in a paper in the journal Nature, their GPT model interprets a person's brain activity via its bloodflow as shown in an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), allowing it access to what the user is "hearing, saying, or imagining". And it does this without any invasive surgery or any attachment on the patient itself. There was a clear opportunity to name the new model BrainGPT, but someone ignored that memo: the researchers refer to their "brain reading" model as GPT-1 instead.
