Ray Kurzweil, the pioneering AI scientist, Google researcher, and widely described "AI visionary," is joining a Silicon Valley startup that is developing a way to put computers in the brain by snorting nanoparticles.

Subsense, a four-year-old company working on brain-computer interface technology, announced the news alongside Kurzweil at an event held at its Palo Alto headquarters on Wednesday evening.

"Ultimately, we want to merge [the smartphone] with the brain," said Kurzweil, whose famous "singularity" theory holds that technology will soon allow humans to transcend the limitations of their biological brains. His involvement lends a high-profile imprimatur to a startup still in its preclinical stage, at a moment when investor and public attention to brain-computer interfaces has grown sharply along with advances in AI.

"The whole point of humans is to go to greater frontiers, expand who we are," Kurzweil said at the event. He described external devices such as smartphones as a barrier that slows our ability to access the power of AI.

Subsense is one of numerous neurotechnology companies developing brain-computer interfaces, among which Elon Musk's Neuralink is the most prominent. Neuralink has implanted wireless chips in the brains of roughly a dozen people, enabling patients paralyzed by spinal cord injuries to control computers with their thoughts. Other players in the field include Synchron, which threads its implant through blood vessels, and Precision Neuroscience, both of which—like Neuralink—have reached human trials, underscoring how early a nonsurgical, nanoparticle-based approach remains by comparison.

While Neuralink's approach requires drilling through the skull to implant electrodes, Subsense is developing a nonsurgical—though still quite invasive—method that introduces charged nanoparticles into the brain intranasally. The process would be similar to inhaling allergy medicine through a nasal spray. Once inside the brain, the nanoparticles would be controlled—to stimulate neurons in specific brain regions or to read neuron activity—via a specialized cap or headset containing magnetic coils. At the event, Subsense displayed a nonfunctional mock-up of such a cap, which resembled a cross between a baseball cap and a bike helmet.

However, the science-fiction-like technology remains years away from availability, assuming it ever makes it beyond the laboratory. Subsense, which has raised $27 million in funding—a fraction of the more than $1 billion Neuralink has raised—is currently conducting preclinical work, experimenting with various elements of the technology and carrying out some experiments on mice. Any path to market would also run through extensive regulatory review, including FDA approval processes that device makers in this space must clear before human use. The company hopes to first make the technology available for medical use and eventually turn it into a consumer product.

"I believe the brain-computer interface eventually may become one of the most intimate technologies that human beings ever created," CEO Tetiana Aleksandrova said on Wednesday.

In his role as a product and vision advisor at Subsense, Kurzweil will provide perspective on the company's technology road map and on how the convergence of AI and neural interfaces will reshape human-computer interactions, the company said.

Kurzweil, a recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, is one of the most influential thinkers in artificial intelligence. His books, including The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Singularity Is Near, predicted many of today's technologies. For Subsense, the question ahead is whether his long-range vision can help steer a nanoparticle-based interface from mouse experiments toward the clinic, a milestone that no company pursuing fully noninvasive brain-computer interfaces has yet reached.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.