Elon Musk has arguably been the boldest broligarch when it comes to brain-machine interfaces. But Mark Zuckerberg is hot on his heels.

Shortly after Musk co-founded Neuralink — the company that’s put chips in three human brains, and counting — in 2016, Meta (then Facebook) also ventured into neurotechnology research, announcing plans to build tech that would let people type with their brains and hear language through their skin.

Since then, Meta-funded researchers have figured out how to decode speech from activity recorded from surgically implanted electrodes inside people’s brains. While brain surgery could feel worth it for a paralyzed person who wants to regain the ability to communicate, invasive devices like these are a hard sell for someone who just wants to type faster. Commercial devices regular people might actually want need to be wearable and removable, rather than permanent.

This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.

Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.

Meta tabled its efforts to build consumer brain-computer interfaces a few years ago: Brain-reading headbands weren’t ready for prime time. Instead of developing new gadgets directly, the company has been investing in slower-burning neuroscience research. Their hope is that studying the brain will help them build AI that’s better at stuff humans are good at, like processing language. Some of this research still focused on mind-reading: specifically, decoding how the brain produces sentences.

This month, though, Meta made a breakthrough.

In collaboration with the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, researchers at Meta’s Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab were able to accurately decode unspoken sentences from brain signals recorded outside the skull — no surgery required.

This was just in a lab, of course. But these findings mark a major step toward the wearable mind-reading devices Zuckerberg promised eight years ago.

And as brain-to-text devices inch closer toward commercial viability in the not-so-distant future, we’ll need to grapple with what it means for Meta to be their gatekeeper. In the lab, mind-reading technology promises to reveal previously unknowable information about how our brains construct thoughts, make decisions, and guide our actions. But out in the world, tech companies may misuse our brain data unless we establish and enforce regulations to stop them.

Meta can decode unspoken sentences from your brain’s magnetic fields

Until a couple years ago, researchers couldn’t decode unspoken language without implanting electrodes inside the brain, which requires surgery. In 2023, scientists........

© Vox