If you thought AI-integrated smart glasses were bad, wait until you get a load of Sabi, a Palo Alto-based startup working on a beanie it says will probe your actual brain signals.

That’s not hyperbole. The company’s eponymous Sabi Cap, per New Atlas, comes lined with 100,000 electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, which will translate electrical signals from your brain into usable data for Sabi’s “Brain Foundation” AI model — all meant to transcribe your thoughts into digital text at what the company says will be a rate of 30 words per minute.

The AI model powering it is said to be trained on 100,000 hours of data from some 100 volunteers, Wired previously reported. But given that thought and speech patterns vary wildly between person to person, the challenge of building a universally workable EEG-to-speech device is enormous, and the company has yet to share any evidence that its product performs as advertised.

“These devices are going to have to be ready to go out of the box,” third-party neurotech consultant JoJo Platt told Wired. “They’re going to have to conform to me rather than me conforming to it.”

The commercial appeal is clear. It’s hard to imagine a surgically implanted brain chip like Neuralink ever gaining genuine mass traction, making a lightweight alternative compelling. And certain evidence does suggest that you could get usable data from outside the skull; as one non-peer-reviewed paper found a few years ago, AI models fine-tuned with EEG data represent a “significant advancement towards portable, low-cost ‘thoughts-to-text’ technology with potential applications in both neuroscience and natural language processing.”

Yet as a peer-reviewed paper published in Scientific Reports last year found, the efficacy of EEG-to-text models remains “unclear due to limitations in evaluation methodologies.” The early promise of EEG, the later study argues, is likely the result of flashy pattern memorization rather than a novel tech that can decode human brain waves.

In other words, it’s possible Sabi’s founders have massively underestimated how advanced their brain foundation model really is. Until we get a glimpse at the product, set to release later in 2026, it’s anyone’s guess whether this is a true mind-reading device, or just a very expensive hat.

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