After 18 months at OpenAI, 23-year-old chess master Naomi Bashkansky has joined brain-computer interface startup Conduit as a founding researcher, betting that thoughts could become the next interface for communicating with artificial intelligence. Bashkansky, who holds the titles of World School Chess Champion in the girls’ under-13 category and North American Champion in the girls’ under-20 category, as well as Woman International Master (WIM) from the International Chess Federation, worked for the past year and a half on OpenAI’s model safety and alignment team. She announced Wednesday that she had left the company two weeks earlier to join Conduit, which is developing technology designed to convert thoughts into text. “My prediction: In a couple years, the main way we'll talk with our AIs is with our thoughts,” Bashkansky wrote, adding that AIs “will be a natural, joyful extension of you.” She believes the technology “could be worth more than a trillion dollars.” Bashkansky predicted that by 2027, users could wear a specialized headband capable of decoding thoughts into text, and by 2030, AI companies will have trained their models to communicate directly with Conduit’s technology. She wrote that her “encoded thoughts get sent directly to Codex,” allowing communication of thoughts hard to describe in text, like mental images. She described the vision as “literally a human-in-the-loop future, where AI directly empowers humans rather than replacing us