Ray Kurzweil, the AI scientist and Google researcher known as an 'AI Visionary,' is joining Subsense, a four-year-old Palo Alto startup developing a brain-computer interface delivered through the nose rather than the skull.
Subsense announced the news alongside Kurzweil at an event at its headquarters on Wednesday evening. Kurzweil will serve as a product and vision advisor, offering perspective on the company's technology roadmap and on how AI and neural interfaces will reshape human-computer interaction, the company said.
'Ultimately we want to merge [the smartphone] with the brain,' Kurzweil said at the event. He described external devices like smartphones as a barrier slowing humans' ability to access the power of AI, and said 'the whole point of humans is to go to greater frontiers, expand who we are.'
Unlike Elon Musk's Neuralink, which drills through the skull to implant electrodes and has placed wireless chips in the brains of roughly a dozen paralyzed patients — letting them control computers with their thoughts — Subsense is pursuing a non-surgical, though still invasive, method. It involves introducing charged nano particles into the brain intra-nasally, similar to inhaling allergy medicine via nasal spray. Once inside, the particles would be controlled through a specialized cap or headset containing magnetic coils to stimulate neurons or read their activity. Subsense showed a non-functional mock-up of the cap, which resembled a cross between a baseball cap and a bike helmet.
The technology remains years from any commercial reality, if it ever escapes the lab at all. Subsense, which has raised $27 million in funding, is in pre-clinical work, testing elements of the system and running experiments on mice. The company hopes to eventually bring the technology to medical use before pursuing a consumer product.
'I believe the brain computer interface eventually may become one of the most intimate technologies that human beings ever created,' Subsense CEO Tetiana Aleksandrova said Wednesday.
Kurzweil, a National Medal of Technology and Innovation recipient, built his reputation on forecasts many of which anticipated real technologies, laid out in books including 'The Age of Intelligent Machines' and 'The Singularity is Near.' His 'singularity' theory holds that technology will soon let humans transcend the limits of the biological brain.
The numbers come first: $27 million raised, one advisor with a decades-long track record of predicting the technology curve, and a product that has yet to run a single human trial. That is a modest bet by Silicon Valley standards, and it is entirely private capital — no federal grant, no mandate, no taxpayer exposure.
That is precisely how frontier science should be financed. Investors who believe in the singularity thesis are free to fund it; those who do not are free to walk away. Neuralink proved the surgical route works for paralyzed patients who volunteered for it. Subsense is now testing whether a less invasive path can reach the same frontier. Either way, the risk sits with the venture backers and the founders, not with the public purse — which is exactly the incentive structure that has made American innovation, for all its excesses, the envy of bureaucrats abroad who prefer to regulate first and build later.
