An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at from a brain scan

MIT Technology ReviewOct 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026, 6:32 AM AST

fMRI scans track blood oxygen in the brain, and Weizmann Institute researchers trained AI on scans from people who viewed thousands of images to link their brain activity to what they saw. It can rebuild the viewed image from a scan, and predict brain activity from an image; scientists hope it could help locked-in patients communicate, while others warn it could extract thoughts without consent.

Summary written with AI by HowTechMoves, based on reporting by MIT Technology Review.

All tech news

AI
The VergeOct 15, 2026
ChatGPT can peek at your Chrome tabs now
ChatGPT's Chrome extension can now look at the tabs you already have open. When you tag Chrome in a prompt, it can compare products across tabs, fill out forms, or draft emails, and the sidebar now brings your full chat history to any page. ChatGPT Work can also control tabs to send messages, fill forms or download files.
Read original at The Verge (opens in a new tab)
AI
TechCrunchOct 15, 2026
Meta launches an open-weight AI model that runs on Macs
Open-weight models publish their internal settings, so anyone can download and run them instead of only using the maker's app. Meta says its new Muse Spark Open, an 816 billion parameter model that is natively multimodal, is the most capable open model from the US. Running it on a Mac locally needs at least a terabyte of RAM, best on a new Mac Studio.
Read original at TechCrunch (opens in a new tab)
AI
The DecoderOct 15, 2026
Black Forest Labs' open-weights image model FLUX 3 Image Klein runs on consumer GPUs with just 8 GB of VRAM
Most image generators run in the cloud, but open weights let people run them on their own computer. Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Image Klein, a model with 5.6 billion parameters that outputs 4K pictures, edits them at the pixel level and can take up to ten reference pictures. A lower-precision build fits on an 8 GB graphics card, drawing an image in under nine seconds on an RTX 4070.
Read original at The Decoder (opens in a new tab)
AI
The DecoderOct 15, 2026
Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is an open model built to run enterprise AI agents nonstop
Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, an open 120 billion parameter model for enterprise agents that keep working in the background. It is a mixture of experts, so only 12 billion parameters run for each token, and it uses 4-bit compression plus draft-and-check decoding that Nvidia says speeds up text generation. Smaller Bolt versions fit on machines with 24 GB of memory.
Read original at The Decoder (opens in a new tab)

Related stories