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Neuroscientist's AI-Powered Startup Aims To Transform Human Cognition With Perfect, Infinite Memory (msn.com) 75

Posted by EditorDavid from the total-recall dept.
Bloomberg describes him as a "former Harvard Medical School professor whose research has focused on the intersection of AI and neuroscience."

"For the past 20 years, I studied how the human brain stores and retrieves memories," Kreiman writes on LinkedIn. And now "My co-founder Spandan Madan and I built a new algorithm to endow humans with perfect and infinite memory." Engramme connects to your **memorome**, i.e., entire digital life. Large Memory Models work in the same way that your brain encodes and retrieves information. Then memories are recalled automatically — no searching, no prompting, no hallucinations. [The startup's web site promises "omniscient AI to augment human cognition."]

We have built the memory layer for EVERY app. Read our manifesto about augmenting human cognition. ["We are not just building software; we are enabling a complete transformation of human cognition. When the friction disappears between needing a piece of information and recalling it, the nature of thought itself changes. This synergy between biological intuition and digital precision will be the most disruptive force in modern history, fundamentally reshaping every profession... We are dedicated to creating a world where everyone has the power to remember everything they have ever learned, seen, or felt "]

Welcome to a new future where you can remember everything. This is the MEMORY SINGULARITY: after 300,000 years, this is the moment that humans stop forgetting.
Bloomberg reports that the startup (spun out of a lab at Harvard) is "in talks with investors to raise about $100 million, according to people familiar with the matter."

Neuroscientist's AI-Powered Startup Aims To Transform Human Cognition With Perfect, Infinite Memory More | Reply

Neuroscientist's AI-Powered Startup Aims To Transform Human Cognition With Perfect, Infinite Memory

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  • I would be happy (Score:5, Funny)

    by zawarski ( 1381571 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @12:37PM (#66090110)
    With forgetting I just read all that.

    • You could beat me to the joke.

      I actually think it's an interesting story in terms of aging, but wouldn't it be nicer to stay with the memories of peak happiness? Too much of the recent stuff strikes me as unpleasant or insane or both...

    • A data center "outage" and all your bank and buttcoin passwords belong to them. Best, you would not even remember you owned any.

  • So let me get this straight... (Score:4, Informative)

    by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @12:48PM (#66090126) Journal

    I'm doomed to remember the awful, awful date with an attractive woman I really liked, where I shouldn't have had coffee after dinner and we went back to her place, and she only had a curtain for a bathroom door, and I needed to have an explosive dump right now and I had to bolt out of there like an idiot?

    In Technicolor?

    I won't be able to bury that?

  • "You too!" x âz

  • ...another bubble.

  • What could go wrong? (Score:3)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @01:41PM (#66090192)

    When the friction disappears between needing a piece of information and recalling it, the nature of thought itself changes.

    Ah, doesn't that sound grand and noble! But do we really want it? What we have currently has evolved over millennia. I don't trust anybody - never mind tech bros - to mess with it. Especially not when further concentration of wealth is their real goal.

    This synergy between biological intuition and digital precision will be the most disruptive force in modern history, fundamentally reshaping every profession...

    Oh great! Those who would shape the evolution of human thinking can't even be bothered to talk seriously about their own mission. They recycled some trendy wording stolen from an old corporate HR memo, and used it to represent their "revolutionary" idea. These are clearly NOT serious people.

    We are dedicated to creating a world where everyone has the power to remember everything they have ever learned, seen, or felt

    Never mind "dedicated". Instead, you must be "committed". And the sooner we can get you committed to the psych facility you clearly need, the better. That might stop you from scamming credulous investors in what looks an awful lot like the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of a pump 'n' dump scheme.

    These days, it really is true that most of the so-called "substance" behind our financial markets is in fact inferior self-aggrandizing Madison Avenue ad copy that sounds like the product of an extended trip on 'shrooms. Yay Capitalism!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Ah, doesn't that sound grand and noble! But do we really want it? What we have currently has evolved over millennia. I don't trust anybody - never mind tech bros - to mess with it. Especially not when further concentration of wealth is their real goal.

      Oof.
      The reason you shouldn't trust techbros is because the techbros have proven themselves not to be trusted. There's no reason to sully a legitimate reason behind such a ridiculous statement.

      Evolution doesn't find the best way to do something. It pits multiple ways of doing something against each other and destroys the least best among those options.

      There are countless ways everything "evolved over millennia" could be improved.
      Yes, don't let or trust the techbros to do it, but only because they are proven

      • the fact our waste management system and reproductive system are so closely intertwined.

        Could be worse [wikipedia.org].

      • All good points - thanks for the fresh perspective.

        That said, even with the flaws you pointed out, we manage to make what evolution handed to us actually work. I fear that the compressed time frames and the lack of "try before you buy" that come with our attempts to fool Mother Nature may backfire.

        I totally get the desire to

        take our improvements out of the hands of evolution and put it solidly into ours

        , but I don't trust that desire. That's probably because I don't trust mankind's wisdom. After all, that very wisdom is a product of the same evolution which gave us the

        need to breath through the same orifice we have to shove liquids and large chunks of solids into

        8-}

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The dude invented the hash table and wants someone to give him 100 million dollars for it (to start). How's he supposed to do that without some verbal razzle dazzle?

    • "I'm sorry, this memory has been redacted"

    • Ah, doesn't that sound grand and noble! But do we really want it? What we have currently has evolved over millennia. I don't trust anybody - never mind tech bros - to mess with it. Especially not when further concentration of wealth is their real goal.

      Indeed, so good job that these people can't possibly deliver anything even remotely like that. The claims they make are breathtakingly shameless.

      Real memories include things like what something smelled like, what it felt like to the touch, the emotions you felt at the time. How are they going to "frictionlessly recall" that exactly?

      Engramme connects to your **memorome**, i.e., entire digital life

      So what this sounds like, you can enter into their app "what did I do on June 15th, 2023?" And it'll tell you something like 'According to your Linkedin, you had a meeting with a

  • I want to be able to temporarily forget things. Imagine being able to watch your favourite film as if it were the first time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Also, same old jokes still work.

    • We've had that for thousands of years, at least since the dawn of agriculture. The hangover or other side effects can be a bit rough though.

  • Hollywood got there first (Score:4, Informative)

    by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @02:04PM (#66090222)

    "Brainstorm" (1983) Douglas Trumbull dir. : Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood (her last movie). A device records experience and memory from one brain, and allows it to be played back into another. Someone records sex, splices an orgasm loop, and is disabled by overload (like a Niven "wirehead"). A sinister government project is formed to exploit the technology. Someone records a psychotic; someone else finds the tape labelled "Toxic" and plays it anyway.

    See also "They Saved Hitler's Brain" (1968).

    • Online porn did that IRL. Every scenario. Every position. Every fetish. Every body type.

      Teen boys watching all of it. Jaded. Nothing surprising. Nothing new. Nothing they haven't already done, vicariously, too many times.

      Lots of memories. Lots of experience, in theory. And then in practice, they can't get it up.

      Look it up. They complain about it online.

    • See also the short story Funes the Memorious by Borges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious).

  • You'd have to wear some always-on video recording device, and the AI would be listening to everything, watching everything, and understanding everything happening to you (in the cloud no doubt), and then remembering it, and then prompting you with memories when it feels they're appropriate to your current situation? Sounds like a bit of a stretch, technology-wise, and privacy-wise. One for the cyborgs, maybe.

  • This sounds like a scam. Real scientific products have real science behind them, and they trumpet their science. This has ... biz-speak.

    And no, I do not believe in that any "new algorithm" can "endow humans with perfect and infinite memory." If it sounds too good ...

  • ads (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @02:24PM (#66090248)
    All of the sudden I remember that I urgently need to extend my car's warranty...

  • The critical importance of forgetting (Score:5, Informative)

    by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @02:31PM (#66090256)
    Rather than try to paraphrase, let me point to The Importance of Forgetting | Episteme | Cambridge Core [cambridge.org] and Why forgetting is beneficial [bbc.com] and Why Forgetting is Good for Your Memory [columbiapsychiatry.org] among many, MANY other sources that easy to find with a search.

    If you don't want to read those, here's the TL;DR version: forgetting isn't a bug; it's a feature. It serves a critical function in our cognition, and it has evolved to serve that function over millions of years.

    These idiots are trying to tamper with natural forces that they don't understand and don't respect, and they're doing it with zero regard for the consequences to human society. Just like Crichton's scientists in Jurassic Park, there's no humility, only ambition and greed.

    • Ted Chiang’s 2013 story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (https://www.are.na/block/4600052) explores the cognitive and social consequences of a lifelog retrieval system called Remem. The narrative examines how technologies that record and preserve information—from oral tradition to writing, and eventually to continuous digital capture—reshape human memory, perception, and relationships.

      The story interweaves this near-future scenario with a historical account of an African tribe enco

      • What about the Faded Suns trilogy, which had humans interacting with a species that never forgets and one that forgets at will.
        • Haven't read it; sounds interesting. But a whole trilogy? One of the things I respect about Chiang's writing is his economy. He can explore important philosophical or moral themes with sensitive insight and honesty, and do it thoroughly in a short story format. A few of his stories don't seem very polished. But still they leave you thinking about the ideas they illustrated.
    • They're also not considering that forgetting may also be computationally beneficially for AIs.

  • Are they trying to invent the perfect robotic wife?

  • Meaninglessness (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FeltLion ( 1289024 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @03:01PM (#66090300) Journal
    We remember things because they are meaningful to us. If we remember everything that nothing will be meaningful, and our souls will be as flat as the screens that we stare at all day.

  • My prediction (Score:3)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @03:21PM (#66090330)

    "in talks with investors to raise about $100 million"

    An infinite memory s going to take an infinite amount of money.

  • ...of stuff that doesn't matter
    Imperfect, limited, ordinary memory for the important stuff

  • That sounds awesome. How much of it is doable before the investors have been bled dry?

  • Obvious Scam (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sudonim2 ( 2073156 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @03:59PM (#66090392)

    These fuckers learned absolutely nothing from Theranos or the other medtech scam startups, did they?

  • You have to forget things.. it's matter of priorities, all things cannot vie for your attention at the same time. Not many people want to have total recall, it causes psychological problems. Like the promise of extended lifespans, a lot of people will admit the are bored and won't know how to use infinite time. They'll kill themselves . See Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TA ( 14109 )

      Absolutely. Can't agree more. If you keep remembering everything perfectly then you'll have problems. I know a guy with extremely high IQ and a memory to match. He doesn't forget anything. Read a textbook, leave it at home. Cite any page. Anyway - and here's the crux - if there's, say, a slightly heated technical discussion at work, it's like *now* forever after. A couple of years later? Same. Which means that after a while there aren't many people left he can really work well with.. the heated discussion

      • this is just me extemporizing, but part of the issue is that consciousness is like your cpu and registers, we work similarly, where your attention, your focus, is what you are thinking at the current moment... you load the latest sensory and thinking information into your registers, and deal with it. You can't deal with more than one thing, or possibly a few things, at one time. It's a processing bottleneck. Many greater minds have suggested that intelligence needs many things, like a body to experience the

  • How to maintain traumas forever (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Schoenlepel ( 1751646 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @05:24PM (#66090502)

    Remember that root-canal treatment you needed five years ago? Yeah, now you can! Including all the extreme pain because the dentist could not anesthetize because it was infected.

    Or how about perfectly remembering getting raped?

    Yeah, that'll help create some phobias.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "Or how about perfectly remembering getting raped?"

      I suspect rape victims have excellent recall already. But Jerry Falwell would certainly what to regulate memories of such things, dependent on who's doing the raping and who's doing the suffering, of course.

      Doesn't matter, won't happen. It's a grift, nothing more. Maybe Sam Altman can buy it, charity that he is.

  • What idiot thinks e-memory is memory? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @06:00PM (#66090528) Homepage

    I mean really. The ability for electronic devices to instantly recall things for you is not your memory.

  • endow humans with perfect and infinite memory.

    I have a feeling politicians won't want people to use this tech.

  • As anybody "gifted" with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) can tell you, not being able to forget has major downsides.

  • Not how long term memory works (Score:5, Insightful)

    by puzzled ( 12525 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @06:56PM (#66090602) Homepage Journal

    Being able to flawless recall a moment would perhaps be useful, but this is NOT how human long term memory works. When healthy, we revisit and reinforce that which is happy, and helpful, and positive. When we can't let go of the past, that's often tied to things we describe as mental illness. Just ask anyone who's ever been treated for PTSD.

    I remember that wave of emotion the first time I ever kissed *THAT* girl. And since we didn't have email or text messages, and I hadn't met her parents yet, I can also take you to the precise place on that Iowa highway where I heard her funeral announcement. I drove a couple more miles in stunned silence, before I realized it was scheduled on my 20th birthday.

    I'll turn fifty nine in a week or so. Every year she fades a little more, but stopping to write this brings that hurt back, as sharp as ever.

    This is a double edged sword and we should think twice before drawing it ...

  • Look at the pretty stock certificate. Isn't it pretty? You should buy a whole bunch of them. No, we don't have anything else to sell. Why would we need anything else to sell when we have these pretty stock certificates.

    GIVE US MONEY!!!

  • "House" did this: A woman who remembered every argument. Yes, she was an uber-bitch.

    Sure, remembering how to make the perfect airplane landing, every time, is a bonus. Plus, remembering the Bible/Quran contradicts human experience would end those religions. Or, remembering how stupid many politicians are, would change the world. But remembering the daily drive to work would be agony. The reality is, we need to forget details, to survive. Remembering the agony of childbirth, or awkwardness of her fi

  • The Columbia research Small published is the key to understanding why this whole premise is backwards. The brain doesn't have one system — it has two: one that encodes and one that actively prunes. They're separate molecular mechanisms. The pruning isn't a deficiency. It's the architecture. Think about what abstraction actually requires. You can't generalize from experience if every experience is preserved at full fidelity. Pattern recognition depends on lossy compression — you have to discard

  • "Infinite", you say (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday April 12, 2026 @09:33PM (#66090774)

    And there you are already lying. Nice when scammers are this obvious.

  • We haven't built any brain machine interfaces that work well, so I'm being that tired won't work well either. Also these guys don't have make their promises work to get the money, they just have to say they'll make it work. All you need is cred

  • Not sure that's good (Score:3)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) <treboreel@live.com> on Sunday April 12, 2026 @11:02PM (#66090878) Journal

    I would prefer that I didn't recall the pain of breaking my arm perfectly, thank-you. Could you imagine not having time to dull the edge of bad memories. My wife passed in 2001. I 'm really glad I don't recall that incident with perfect clarity.

  • AI is a programmed problem for society.
  • First step is to enhance your memories. Next step is to supplement your memories (plug-in modules like the Matrix, so you "remember" how to fly a helicopter). The step after that is to apply memories and thoughts not your own, so someone else can take over your body ... Might be good for backup/restore at some point, but I can see the possibilities for misuse too.

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