Elon Musk Neuralink Update!

Summary

Episode Summary: Elon Musk Neuralink Update!

Podcast Title: Elon Musk Thinking
Host: Astronaut Man
Episode: Elon Musk Neuralink Update!
Release Date: December 10, 2024

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Introduction

In this episode of "Elon Musk Thinking," host Astronaut Man presents a comprehensive update on Neuralink, Elon Musk's ambitious brain-machine interface (BMI) company. The discussion delves into the progress of Neuralink's first patient, technological advancements, future plans, and the broader implications of integrating human intelligence with digital systems.

Meet the Team

The episode features insights from key Neuralink team members:

• DJ Sull (01:32): Electrical Engineer and Chip Designer, leading the design of Neuralink implants.
• Matthew McDougall (01:47): Neurosurgeon and Head of Neurosurgery at Neuralink.
• Bliss (01:58): Software Engineer focused on translating brain activity into functional applications.

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Progress of the First Neuralink Patient

Telepathy: Controlling Devices with Thought

Neuralink's inaugural product, Telepathy, enables users to control computers and smartphones purely through thought. This groundbreaking technology bypasses traditional input methods like keyboards and mice, offering unprecedented accessibility for individuals with paralysis.

• Quote: "It's purely, purely your thoughts... something that can help millions of people around the world." – Unnamed Announcer 02:03

Real-World Demonstration

The first patient, Nolan, showcased the device by controlling the game Civilization on expert mode solely through brain activity. This demonstration highlighted the device's capacity for high-level multitasking and real-time interaction without physical movement.

• Quote: "He is controlling this with his brain... just thinking about how to move the cursor." – Unnamed Announcer 07:02

Usage Metrics and User Experience

Nolan's engagement with the Neuralink device has been remarkable, logging up to 70 hours of use per week. This extensive usage underscores the device's reliability and the user's ability to integrate it seamlessly into daily activities.

• Quote: "He can even reach 70 hours of using the device a week. This is amazing." – Unnamed Announcer 08:06

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Technical Innovations and Enhancements

Surgical Precision and Implantation

Neuralink employs a sophisticated surgical robot designed to implant ultra-thin electrode threads into the brain with micron-level precision. These threads, resembling fractions of a human hair, read and write electrical signals to facilitate seamless brain-computer interaction.

• Quote: "We have built a surgical robot that can actually precisely target them in any three-dimensional space, X, Y as well as Z with micron level precision." – DJ Sull 16:13

Wireless Charging and Connectivity

The Neuralink device is wirelessly charged inductively, akin to modern wearables like the Apple Watch. Users charge the device using an electromagnetic pad, ensuring convenience and minimizing disruption to daily life.

• Quote: "It's completely wirelessly... like an Apple watch." – Unnamed Announcer 05:42

Addressing Initial Challenges

Air Pocket Mitigation

To enhance implant stability, future surgeries will maintain normal or slightly elevated CO₂ levels during operation. This approach prevents the formation of air pockets that previously disrupted electrode placement.

• Quote: "We are going to keep the CO2 concentration actually quite normal, maybe even slightly elevated." – Matthew McDougall 14:07

Thread Retraction Solutions

Neuralink is refining its implantation technique by inserting electrode threads at varied depths within the brain. This strategy ensures that even if some threads retract, others remain optimally placed to maintain high-bandwidth communication.

• Quote: "We're going to insert at a variety of depths." – Unnamed Announcer 20:30

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Demonstrated Achievements and Performance

Breaking World Records

Nolan has surpassed previous world records in cursor control using Neuralink, achieving superior performance with only 15% of the device's channels functional. This feat demonstrates the system's inherent efficiency and the potential for future enhancements.

• Quote: "Twice as good as the previous world record... only 15% of channels are working." – Unnamed Announcer 10:48

Bandwidth Goals and Human-AI Symbiosis

Neuralink aims to escalate the device's bandwidth from the current 10 bits per second towards megabit and gigabit levels. Achieving such speeds is pivotal for fostering a symbiotic relationship between human cognition and artificial intelligence.

• Quote: "Ultimately, we can get to megabit level... gigabit level is possible." – Unnamed Announcer 30:44

Expanding Applications

Beyond gaming and device control, Neuralink envisions integrating its technology with robotic arms, wheelchairs, and other assistive devices. This integration is intended to restore and enhance physical autonomy for individuals with motor impairments.

• Quote: "Our plan is, as we mentioned earlier, robotic arm and wheelchair to unlock independence in the physical world." – Unnamed Announcer 40:16

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Future Directions and Scaling Operations

Preparing for Subsequent Implants

Neuralink is set to implant the device in a second patient within the coming weeks, incorporating lessons learned from the first surgery to enhance outcomes and minimize complications.

• Quote: "We hope to have high single digits this year." – Unnamed Announcer 35:32

Manufacturing and Surgical Scalability

The team has invested heavily in scaling both device manufacturing and surgical procedures, aiming to support thousands of implants in the near future. This investment is crucial for meeting the growing demand and ensuring accessibility.

• Quote: "We've built thousands and thousands of devices... investing very heavily in infrastructure." – DJ Sull 36:59

Device Upgrades and Longevity

Neuralink plans to offer upgrade pathways for implanted devices, allowing users to benefit from technological advancements without the need for permanent implants. This approach mirrors the iterative upgrades seen in consumer electronics like smartphones.

• Quote: "We do think it's going to be important to be able to upgrade the device over time." – Unnamed Announcer 59:08

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Ethical, Safety, and Regulatory Considerations

Minimizing Neural Damage

The ultra-thin, flexible electrode threads are designed to reduce scarring and immune responses, ensuring long-term compatibility with brain tissue. Surgical techniques focus on precision to further minimize any potential damage.

• Quote: "The smaller they are, the less likely the brain is to react to them... minimize any damage to neurons." – Unnamed Announcer 58:01

Regulatory Approvals and Safety Protocols

Neuralink is actively collaborating with regulatory bodies like the FDA to ensure the safety and efficacy of its devices, especially as it plans to interface with physical assistive technologies like wheelchairs.

• Quote: "It's really a matter of paperwork... make sure that safety is proven." – Unnamed Announcer 40:45

Addressing Public Concerns and Misconceptions

The team clarifies that Neuralink implants are exclusively medical devices for participating patients, addressing widespread misconceptions and unfounded fears about unauthorized brain implants.

• Quote: "There are a remarkable number of people who think we have put a chip in their brain, but we have not." – Unnamed Announcer 47:02

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Potential Future Applications

Enhancing Human Capabilities

Neuralink aspires not just to restore lost functions but to augment human abilities, potentially allowing users to perceive beyond natural human limits by integrating sensory inputs like infrared or ultraviolet vision.

• Quote: "We want to give people superpowers... that's very exciting." – Unnamed Announcer 25:48

Cognitive and Sensory Feedback

Future developments aim to incorporate proprioceptive and tactile feedback, essential for tasks like grasping objects with robotic limbs, thereby providing a more intuitive and natural user experience.

• Quote: "There's a proprioceptive feedback... especially for a robot arm." – Unnamed Announcer 53:22

Repairing Paralysis

Preliminary work suggests that Neuralink could bridge damaged neural pathways, potentially restoring naturalistic movement in individuals with spinal cord injuries. However, this application remains in early research stages.

• Quote: "We've done preliminary work implanting a second neuralink in the spinal cord... but this isn't something that is, you know, don't hold your breath waiting for it." – Unnamed Announcer 35:32

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Conclusion

The "Elon Musk Neuralink Update!" episode provides an optimistic perspective on the future of brain-machine interfaces. With significant advancements already demonstrated by the first patient and robust plans for scaling and enhancing the technology, Neuralink stands at the forefront of revolutionizing human interaction with digital systems. The team's commitment to safety, ethical considerations, and continuous improvement underscores Neuralink's potential to transform lives and redefine human capabilities.

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Notable Quotes

• Unnamed Announcer [02:03]: "This is really quite a profound device that can help a lot of people who have lost the connection between their brain and body."

• Unnamed Announcer [07:02]: "It's not a high bar for you actually, just to be clear, this guy he's controlling this with his brain."

• DJ Sull [16:13]: "We have built a surgical robot that can actually precisely target them in any three-dimensional space, X, Y as well as Z with micron level precision."

• Unnamed Announcer [10:48]: "Twice as good as the previous world record... only 15% of channels are working."

• Unnamed Announcer [30:44]: "Ultimately, we can get to megabit level... gigabit level is possible."

• Unnamed Announcer [40:16]: "Our plan is, as we mentioned earlier, robotic arm and wheelchair to unlock independence in the physical world."

• Unnamed Announcer [59:08]: "We do think it's going to be important to be able to upgrade the device over time."

• Unnamed Announcer [58:01]: "The smaller they are, the less likely the brain is to react to them... minimize any damage to neurons."

• Unnamed Announcer [47:02]: "There are a remarkable number of people who think we have put a chip in their brain, but we have not."

• Unnamed Announcer [25:48]: "We want to give people superpowers... that's very exciting."

• Unnamed Announcer [53:22]: "There's a proprioceptive feedback... especially for a robot arm."

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This detailed summary captures the essence of the "Elon Musk Neuralink Update!" episode, highlighting the groundbreaking advancements, technical intricacies, and the visionary goals of Neuralink in revolutionizing human-machine interactions.

Transcript

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We're prohibited by law. 18 + terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Neuralink Live Update. We're going to tell you about the progress of the first patient with the Neuralink and sort of do a recap of the progress there, then talk about what changes we're making for the second patient, which we're hoping to do an implant in the next week or so. And this is for our first product which is called Televathy, which enables you to control a computer or a phone just by thinking. So let's in fact. So we'll start off with just some introductions. Dj, you want to start?

[DJ Sull]

Hi everyone. My name is DJ Sull. I'm an electrical engineer and a chip designer by training. I led the design of first several generations of the Neuralink implant. Currently I was on the founding team and currently a president.

[Matthew McDougall]

I'm Matthew McDougall. I'm a practicing neurosurgeon and head of Neurosurgery at Neuralink.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, go ahead.

I'm head of Brain Interfaces Applications.

And I'm Bliss. I'm a software engineer at Neuralink trying to figure out how to turn brain activity into cool stuff in the world.

All right, thank you. Well, let's see. So we'll just get going into the presentation. So our first product is something like I said, we call Telepathy, which enables the person with Neuralink implant to control their phone or computer just by thinking. And once you can control your phone and computer, you can essentially Control almost anything and literally just by thinking. So there's no eye tracking or anything. It is purely, purely your thoughts. So this is really quite a profound device that can help a lot of people who have lost the connection between their brain and body. So imagine people like Stephen Hawking who imagine if he could communicate at the same speed as someone who still had the connection to their brain and body. So it's really something that can help millions of people around the world. And it's part of our overall goal of enabling a very high bandwidth connection between the brain and the rest of the world and your computers. The long term goal, which sounds a little esoteric, is to mitigate the risk of the civilizational risk of AI by having a sort of closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence. But that will take many years. Along the way we're going to help solve a lot of brain injury or spinal injury issues. So without post product telepathy, that's going to be really quite profound. There is also potential long term for bridging the gaps of there are damaged or severed neurons being able to span the gap between the brain's motor cortex to the spine to enable someone to use their body again. I think that would be very exciting. And it's, you know, that is something that is possible in the long term. And then our second product which we've demonstrated to work with monkeys is Blindsight, which would enable someone who is completely blind or lost both eyes or completely lost their optic nerve to be able to see. So that's, that's something that we hope to demonstrate in the future. So this just gives you a sense of what the device is a way to think about. The neuralink device is kind of like a Fitbit or an Apple watch with tiny wires or electrodes. Those tiny wires are implanted in the brain and they read and write electrical signals. So a lot of people think the brain is this incredibly mysterious thing. It is mysterious in a lot of ways, but it is actually, it does operate with electrical signals. So if you can read and write those electrical signals, you can interface with the brain. And the device is sized so that it is the same size as the piece of skull that is removed. So if it is like a centimeters diameter of skull that's removed, we replaced that with the device after implanting the tiny wires with the surgical robot. And that enables read write capability to the neurons.

[DJ Sull]

Completely wirelessly.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yes, exactly, it's completely wirelessly. So like I could have a neuralink right now, you wouldn't know and it Charges inductively. So you could just basically have them electromagnetic pad that you charge the device with. So yeah, it's like an Apple watch. Exactly. So.

[DJ Sull]

Except that it's actually a much harder technical challenge to solve given that there's limit as to how much eat the brain tissue. Whereas in for phones and you don't actually really care how much if it's sitting on a table.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Sure, yeah. So it's got to go through skin and stuff as well in our case. So it is a tougher challenge to charge and to have high bandwidth communications given that it's got to go through skin and hair and stuff.

[DJ Sull]

We have solved it.

[Unnamed Announcer]

But. We have solved it. Yes. So yeah.

Yeah.

So our first step with telepathy is basically to unlock digital independence for people with paralysis and to allow them control the computer just with their mind without moving their body. And our goal is to provide them the same level of control functionality and reliability that I have when I'm using a computer, even better than the level of control I have.

It's not a high bar for you actually, just to be clear, this guy, he's controlling this with his brain. So he's not like you can't see his hands in this video, but he's not using a mouse and keyboard. Just thinking about how to move the cursor and playing Civilization.

[DJ Sull]

No eye tracker.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Right. There's no eye tracking from.

I mean he's live streaming. Watch this on Twitter.

Just thinking. That's it.

Just thinking.

[Matthew McDougall]

Just a couple days ago.

[DJ Sull]

Cursor move here.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is like last night or two nights ago.

[DJ Sull]

Yes, I think, I think the way he also described that is he's using the.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, he has many more videos on his. On the platform. Definitely check them out. Yeah, so he can. He's streaming that live and also can talk and like move his head without a problem. Multitasking.

Yeah. You can also like, if you join this live stream, you can ask him questions. He'll tell you all about what it's like to move. Right.

[DJ Sull]

Also, I think I haven't played Civilization myself, but I think this is actually not easy mode. This is expert mode.

[Unnamed Announcer]

This is emperor mode. Emperor mode, if you have played civil is like the highest difficulty level. Just the point is this is a cognitively demanding task while live streaming, playing the hardest mode of game. And he's able to do that while moving.

[DJ Sull]

Curse talking, engaging with the audience while playing games.

[Matthew McDougall]

One of the other games he likes to play a lot is chess. I think it gets lost sometimes that he's actually playing speed chess against me.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah.

[Matthew McDougall]

Which requires an incredibly high fidelity degree of control and speed of control in order to be able to win.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Also, another cool stuff about our device is that you can use it anywhere, anytime. Also on a plane, during a flight while creating really cool memes of cash. Also, our device unlocks things that previously were impossible for our participants. For example, we were able to connect him to his gaming console Switch and play Mario Kart with friends and family. And it was lovely to see them playing together after years. But he couldn't do it since his injury.

Imagine if you're sitting one row over from the sky on a plane. Look over. He's making a cat meme. No hands, no movement. Yeah.

Live in a real world. Yeah.

It's strange. Strange time.

Yeah. And he loves using the device and using it independently daily to watch videos, read, play games using the browser. And the key metrics that we care is to make sure our device is actually useful is to. Is basically the amount of hours he uses the device daily and weekly. And we track it weekly since the surgery and on weeks that he's not too busy and not traveling. He can even reach 70 hours of using the device a week. This is amazing. He would of course love to use it more, but need to run resource sessions. He needs to sleep sometimes and also of course, to charge the device once in a while. Hopefully we'll improve that over time.

Maybe not obvious to people who are watching this. It's a normal MacBook he's controlling. This isn't like some limited edition thing where there's only a few options. He can just do anything that you can do on a MacBook Pro. Same one I have on my desk. Actually, it's the exact same one.

And maybe another interesting point is that on the first day he used BCI control, he was able to break the previous world record for cursor control by using the brain. And recently he even doubled it and was able to outperform about 10% of our engineered neuralink. And you can be sure that we are very good in this game and very quick. And if you want to check out how well you can do it, you can do it on our website. And it's very addictive games.

Yeah, it's a very simple game. You just have to click on the square. But it's actually, even though it sounds silly, it's quite a. Yeah, it can be quite. It sounds like it can be quite addictive. And it's. Especially if you get a low score and you think there's no way I got it. So, I mean, anyone who wants to try this, I recommend going to the Neuralink.com website and seeing if you can beat Nolan's record. And you will find that it's actually quite difficult to do so. And this is really with version one of the device and with only a small percentage of the electrodes that are working. So this is, this is really just the beginning. But even the beginning is twice as good as the world record. This is important to emphasize. The media has a habit of saying that the glass is 10% empty, but actually it's 90% full. So I think it's really quite an accomplishment of the neuralink team to have achieved with the first patient, the first device, twice the world record for the brain to computer bandwidth. That's really an astonishing, an amazingly great outcome and it's only going to get better from here. So the potential is to ultimately get, I think to megabit level. So that's part of the long term goal of improving the bandwidth of the brain computer interface. If you think about how low the bandwidth normally is between a human and a device, the average bandwidth is extremely low. It's, I say, less than 1 bit per second over the course of a day. If there are 86,400 seconds in a day, you're outputting less than that number of bits to any given device, except in perhaps very rare circumstances. So this is actually quite important for AI. Basically for human AI, symbiosis is just being able to communicate at a speed the AI can follow.

[Matthew McDougall]

So yeah, just to emphasize again these performing at this extremely high level with about 15% of his channels functional. And so we want to mitigate any of the problems that led to that situation. So, you know, the brain is a fascinating organ. I'll share with you some of the secrets about the brain. During any typical brain surgery, a small amount of air is introduced into the skull. That's because neurosurgeons like to have as much room as possible around the brain. And so there's this little known control mechanism of allowing the CO2 concentration in the blood to rise a bit, which allows the brain to either expand or contract, depending on where you target that CO2. But typically neurosurgeons will have the brain shrink by lowering CO2. What we're going to do in our future surgeries is keep the CO2 concentration actually quite normal, maybe even slightly elevated, and that'll allow the brain to stay its normal size and shape during surgery. That should eliminate this air pocket that we saw in the first participant, that air pocket we think may have contributed to eating up some of the thread slack as the air bubble migrated to be under the implant, push the brain away from the implant and so that's easy enough to fix. Another consideration that we want to focus on for our upcoming participants is that the brain, think of it like a really complex folded onion. It's layer upon layer of sheets of neurons all over the surface of the brain folded into this odd looking shape. The folds of the brain travel down deep into the brain and along with it go those onion layers of neurons. And if we insert very close to one of the folds where there may be very useful information encoded in neurons, we may end up traveling with our threads parallel to some of the layers of neurons that we're most interested in avoiding them entirely. To avoid that possibility, we're going to insert in our future participants more close to the middle of the apex of the folds, ensuring that we're crossing the layers of interest, layer five of the cortex.

[DJ Sull]

I also think that it's important to highlight here those tiny wires that Elon mentioned, they're fraction of a human hair. They're very flexible, intentionally so because brain's constantly moving and you want the electrodes to be moving with the brain causing less of the scarring. It's actually impossible for a human neurosurgeon, however talented Matthew is, to actually maneuver them by hand. So we have a surgical robot that we built that can actually precisely target them in any three dimensional space, X, Y as well as Z with micron level precision while avoiding vasculature so that you don't disrupt and cause immune response from happening.

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[DJ Sull]

Actually have the technology to be able to place them exactly where we want them in 3D.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah.

[Matthew McDougall]

It was truly amazing to see the surface of the brain after the robot had inserted all the electrodes on the first participant without a drop of blood in sight is really quite an achievement.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yes. So something that probably most people don't realize is that the brain appears to be sort of somewhat undifferentiated. So if you look at the cortex, it looks like a whole bunch of folds that, where, you know, maybe like it's not obvious just looking at say a picture of the brain, that the brain is highly differentiated, that there's. You pretty much know exactly where the part of the brain is that controls your right hand and your left hand and your leg and that kind of thing or vision. It's actually quite precisely located. It's not, some people might think look at the brain like, oh, it could be anywhere. But actually your brain is highly differentiated. Even though it doesn't look, it's. Yeah.

[DJ Sull]

Do you want to describe how we actually where, like how we identify where to drill the crane?

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah.

[Matthew McDougall]

So we can put a patient that is considering this implant into an fmri, so a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and ask them to imagine hand movements that because of the spinal cord injury, don't happen. But just imagining those hand movements causes these areas of the brain to light up. In the FMRI scanner. We have a pretty good idea based in fact, for each individual participant, which part of their brain is going to, you know, respond to imagined movements of the hand. And so we can map those imagined movements, much as we all do when moving a mouse to controlling a cursor on a screen, even without the use of a mouse.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah. But anyway, I think this is kind of an important point that like, it's not like your, the part of your brain that controls your hand might be anywhere in the cortex. It's. This is not the case. It's going to be in a very specific region and it's going to be extremely common across people.

[DJ Sull]

Precision is key too.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah.

The left handed, right handed thing in my mind too, like if you're right handed, you want the device on the left side.

Yeah.

Contralateral side to the hand. That's your dominant.

Yeah. The left side of your brain controls right side of your brain.

[Matthew McDougall]

Everything's crossed another of the risk mitigations we're looking at in the future is that, you know, the implant has a certain size, the depth of the bottom of the implant, actually thinner than the average human skull. And so what we want to be able to do is control the size of the gap under the implant, give the threads that travel from the implant into the brain as much slack as possible. We didn't do this in the first participant because we didn't want to, you know, manipulate any of their tissue that we didn't absolutely have to. In upcoming implants, our plan is to sculpt the surface of the skull very intentionally to minimize the gap under the implant, such that the bottom of the implant travels perfectly flush with the normal contour of the inner side of the skull. That will put the implant closer to the brain. It will eliminate some of the tension on the threads, and we think it will reduce some of the tendency of threads to retract.

[DJ Sull]

And we actually built a tool to do.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Right.

Yeah, this is actually, this is a very important detail. You really want the inner contour of the skull to be flush. So the implant, there's no. The brain doesn't want to pucker up into the gap. That's really quite a big deal. So minimizing the air pocket and the implant being flush with the inside contour of the skull are two very important improvements.

[DJ Sull]

The additional benefit here is that you do see some amount of stick up, what we call stick up.

[Unnamed Announcer]

So you.

[DJ Sull]

Minor bump in the head, but this actually eliminates that even further.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, I mean, really, our goal is that if you run your hand over the top of the skull, you don't feel any bump, you don't feel any device. And that even if someone was bald, you wouldn't really even notice it. And then from the inner contour of the skull, the brain, from a physical standpoint, doesn't really notice that there's a divot in the skull, because there's no divot.

[Matthew McDougall]

Okay. Another aspect of, of the human brain that, you know, obviously differs from any of the animals that we tested in is that the human brain is a lot bigger. And so you may not realize that that means the human brain moves quite a bit more than any of these other smaller brained creatures. And so when we open the skull, we see the brain travel toward and away from the robot about 3 millimeters in total as the heart beats and, and the breathing takes place. And so that movement, you know, it adds a small challenge for the robot in precisely choosing a depth to insert each thread. It's not an enormous challenge. And we've already upgraded the robot's capabilities to be able to even more precisely target depth in even a very rapidly moving brain with a high amplitude of movement. You may think the most obvious mitigation for threads that pulled out of the brain is to insert them deeper. We think so too. And so we're going to broaden the range of depths at which we insert threads. So, you know, for the very first participant, we had an enormous amount of data from our animal work, and we had very highly optimized our insertion depth to maximize the crossing of layers of interest in the cortex with the electrodes that we're recording from. Now that we know retraction is a possibility, we're going to insert at a variety of depths that even in several cases, of differing amounts of retracting threads, we're going to have electrodes at the proper depth and with the deepest threads, be able to track how much retraction has occurred across the surface of the brain from each thread. And so we're going to both have more threads in the right layer and have better data on how much retraction has occurred.

[Unnamed Announcer]

If you're a BCI nerd, you might know that being able to control individual Z depth per thread is not something that most neural interface devices offer. Most neural interface devices are kind of a static fixed rigid array that you push in, and all the electrodes are at one depth.

[Matthew McDougall]

Right.

[Unnamed Announcer]

To be able to do this is actually pretty. Pretty novel part of the robot.

[Matthew McDougall]

Yeah. The historical approach is to actually pound in a sort of bed of nails with an air hammer into the brain.

[Unnamed Announcer]

It looks crazy. Yeah. Just with a pneumatic hammer. It sounds somewhat barbaric. This is not what we do, but this is what's been done before is literally just hammering in what looks like a better nails with the brain, which actually works. It's astonishing that it actually works at all.

But some people, like manual, like DBS probes, you're just sticking in by hand, neurosurgeons just guiding them in.

[Matthew McDougall]

Those are several orders of magnitude more volume of brain tissue that you're destroying compared to what we're doing.

[Unnamed Announcer]

But that deep brain stimulation stuff does actually work. It actually helps people a lot.

Yeah.

Hundreds of thousands. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a great product.

I think we'll be able to do a much more finessed version of that down the road. So, I mean, it's really difficult. Like, the neuralink device is something that really absolutely minimizes damage to the brain. Absolutely minimizes the load on the patient. And the goal is to allow someone to live a completely normal life. You won't even notice that someone even has the device. So like I said, restoring the ability to control your computer and phone, that's telepathy. And then next device being able to allow people to see that could not see before. In fact, you could allow people to see kind of like Door to the Forge in Star Trek, in any whatever.

Infrared.

Yeah, infrared, ultraviolet, radar. So I think another way of saying it is that we want to give people superpowers. So it's not just that we're restoring your prior brain functionality, but that you actually have functionality far greater than a normal human. That's a super big deal.

[DJ Sull]

And I also think, you know, oftentimes the questions that we get a lot is why do you have to actually go into the brain? What if you place it on the surface or outside the skull? Basically, the long story short, the physics of how it works, you really need to get the sensors, which are these facing in the brain next to the source, which neuron as close to it as possible. Otherwise what you get is you get a population response and not be able to kind of do the level of controls that we believe.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, I mean, maybe a good sort of analogy would be like if you're trying to understand what goes on in a factory, you kind of need to go into the factory. You can't just put a stethoscope on the wall and try to figure out what's going like anything on the outside of the. Trying to read things from the outside is like putting a stethoscope on the wall of a factory, trying to understand what's going in the factory. It's not going to be effective. You got to be. Threads are going to be in there. So. But I just want to emphasize again, like, the goal is to give people superpowers, not just to restore prior functionality. So that's very exciting.

[Elon Musk]

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[Unnamed Announcer]

That should give hope to a lot of people in the world that the future is going to be exciting and inspiring and the technology is going to give them superpowers. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, I guess, yeah. Can you multitask with it? Yeah. In fact, if you look at Nolan's streaming and you can just check out Nolan streams on the X platform, he's multitasking all the time. So he's playing video games while talking and listening to podcasts. Listening to podcasts. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's really just like if you're using your hands and you can be playing a video game while talking, I.

Mean, don't take our word for it. Just go watch. Yeah, he's out there on the Internet doing his thing.

Yeah, exactly. So can you do keyboard shortcuts or is it just a mouse?

Yeah, that's actually what we're working on right now.

Sure. So currently he's working with the mouse, but we are also exploring decoding more dimensions from the neural activity. Multiple clicks. So shortcuts or just able to control more games, like cool games with an Xbox controller. But also in the future, we plan to expand to decode text, not just the mouse control, but also allow our participant to type much faster.

Actually.

So maybe going back to the discussion of thread retraction, one of the very exciting parts to me about this story is that we're able to do so much with 15% of channels. When you have more channels, what that actually offers you is not just faster mouse control, because in the motor cortex, neurons don't all represent the same thing. So if you're trying to understand what an individual finger is trying to do, you might or might not have an electrode next to it. And the more channels you have in the brain, the higher likelihood you have representation or decodability of all fingers on the hand. So if you're trying to do something like output text at a fast rate, there's something that matters a lot for people who are completely locked in, who cannot speak at all, who are trying to just say I love you to a loved one in their family or ask for a glass of water or a scratch or whatever. Being able to type at a faster, it's extremely important. And the more fingers you have access to, the higher probability you can do that efficiently. And so, yeah, you know, I'm super excited about how high the ceiling is that we can get to as we resolve this TED retraction issue.

Yeah, we're currently at approximately 10 bits per second, peak rate. But ultimately we want to get to megabit and I think ultimately whole brain interface, I think, you know, many years from now, I think gigabit level is possible. So that's pretty astonishing. Now, this is still version one of our device. As we mentioned, it's version one with only 15% of the threads working. The current device has 64 threads with 16 electrodes on each thread. Our next device has 128 threads with 8 electrodes per thread. Because as we get more confident about how, where exactly to place the thread, you need fewer electrodes per thread. So we can essentially, with the current device, without substantial changes, potentially double the bandwidth if we are accurate with the placement of the threads. And then our next generation device will have maybe even more channels. Yeah, 3,000 and yeah, so next device we're aiming for, yeah, 3,000 channels. So this will just keep getting better and better, really moving up, I think in orders of magnitude, in factors of 10, basically in what kind of bandwidth. So I think it won't be all that long before someone with a neuralink device can communicate faster than someone who has a fully functional body. And yeah, so I think faster than the fastest speed typist or auctioneer.

The esports tournaments are going to be.

Like, you literally won't be able to speak faster than someone can communicate with a neural linked Leopard device.

Maybe a very interesting part of this, basically we currently connect standard inputs to the computer through mouse and keyboards. But very soon, as we will have a much broader bandwidth, we need to think about new ways to actually build the interface for their devices. This is something that we.

Yeah, no, that's a good point. Because the current input devices are centered around human hands. So it's like we've got these little meat sticks that we move and there's a certain rate at which you can move your fingers. And so we've got like the mouse and the keyboard and Xbox controller or something like that, but you really don't need that. You can actually, since you're no longer, if you're not trying to use your hands, you actually don't need those conventional control mechanisms and so this is why ultimately I think you'll be able to do conceptual telepathy where you can communicate entire concepts uncompressed to someone else with a neuralink or to the computer.

Even today we have some problems here where like, you know, if you don't feel the mouse clicking under your finger, how do you know it actually happened? Because you know, you're, you're seeing it on the screen, but you don't actually feel the mouse click. You don't have the proprioceptive feedback of, you know, the keys under your fingertips or the trackpad under your fingertips. So there's all sorts of interesting UX challenges, how to actually give the user some sense of what their decoder is actually doing, what the neuralink is actually doing when they're trying to use.

So wireless.

Yeah, it's Bluetooth, just a Bluetooth connection. Just like how your normal Apple mouse or like Apple Magic keyboard connects to your computer. Same exact thing. In fact, we can basically have this exposed as an HID interface if we want. HID is just the name of the protocol for sending bits from a mouse into a computer. Yeah, I can plug into basically anything.

[DJ Sull]

Yeah, I think we chose that interface because it's ubiquitous. Basically any devices have Bluetooth capabilities. Our long term goal is to actually have our own protocol that is safe and secure. But for now we've chosen it for interoperability.

[Matthew McDougall]

So the question is, can a neuralink chip repair the paralysis in the long term? We can't do that right now. We have done sort of preliminary work implanting a second neuralink in the spinal cord and we can restore naturalistic looking hand and leg movements in animal models. But this isn't something that is, you know, don't hold your breath waiting for it. It's going to be a while. We've got a lot of work to do. But yes, there's no reason in theory that we can't repair paralysis.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, I mean essentially there's no physics barrier to fully solving paralysis. That is perhaps a way to say it, that you've got signals coming from your motor cortex that if they are transferred past the point where the nerves are damaged, essentially just, it's basically a communications bridge. So you bridge the communications from the motor cortex past the point in the neck or spine where the nerves are damaged. And you should like it is physic. It is possible from a physics standpoint to restore full body functionality. For physics standpoint it's a very hard technical problem, but there is nothing that prevents it happening from a physics standpoint. So in terms of next phase of rollout. Well, we really want to make sure that we make as much progress as possible between each neuralink patient. So this is. We're only just moving now to our second Neuralink patient, but we hope to have, you know, if things go well, high single digits this year, and I don't know, maybe this is somewhat dependent on regulatory approval and how much technical progress we make, but within a few years, hopefully thousands.

[DJ Sull]

And I think one thing that is important to highlight is that, you know, it's not that we built only one device and one surgery. We've done hundreds of surgery. We built thousands and thousands of devices even for just the ability to unearth any sort of low frequency failure mode. So we have already been investing very heavily in infrastructure to be able to scale this thing on the device manufacturing side as well as on the surgery side of things. We want to be able to help as many people as quickly as possible go through obviously the appropriate hurdles that are regulatory challenges and proving out the device with.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, and the device implantation really needs to become almost entirely, if not entirely, automatic in the same way that say, Lasik eye surgery is done. You know, you don't have an ophthalmologist with a laser cutter by hand. That, that would be crazy. But the ophthalmologist oversees the LASIK machine and makes sure that the settings are correct. And then the machine does everything and restores your eyesight. It's really remarkable how many people have had their eyesight restored with lasik. And I think there's another one called Smile. They keep making it better. We need to have something similar for a neuralink implantation so that you basically sit down and whatever kind of upgrades or brain fixes are needed, that's reviewed by medical expert. Obviously we want to make sure that that is reviewed correctly, but it really needs to be automatic. So you sit down and within 10 minutes you have a Neuralink device installed very fast. I mean, it's very sort of cyberpunk deus ex, if you played those games.

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[Unnamed Announcer]

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[Matthew McDougall]

Watch.

[Unnamed Announcer]

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When will Neuralink start to interface with other devices like wheelchair? It's a great question. We're currently focusing on controlling computers and unlock independence in the virtual world. Of course, our plan is, as we mentioned earlier, robotic arm and wheelchair to unlock independence in physical world. This of course, add additional risk if you make mistakes your computer. There's that. But we are working with the FDA to allow us to do quite some.

Well, it seems like if the wheelchair has an app. Well, the wheelchair just needs to have an interface.

[DJ Sull]

It does, yeah.

[Unnamed Announcer]

So if the wheelchair has a Bluetooth interface, you could just Bluetooth interface to the wheelchair. And that's probably something we should do pretty soon.

It's really a matter of paperwork. I'm showing that it can do it safely. You don't want to drive off a cliff.

Well, I think we can limit the speed so it doesn't go careening off into disaster, but, you know, so just make it go slowly at first. But yeah, so being able to sort of really, the neural device just should work generally for anything that's got a.

[DJ Sull]

Bluetooth interface, including potentially an Optimus.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yes, yes. You could communicate with Optimus. Yep, absolutely. Optimus. We also be able to talk to Optimus, but like, why not just beam it? But you could just. Yeah, instead of talking, you could just beam it directly. Or if someone has lost the use of speech, then they can still communicate to an Optimus. They can communicate telepathically. To optimists or by Bluetooth. And so even if someone has completely lost the ability to speak, they could still control Optimus or their computer or phone.

Also, if you have an optimus and you have a neuralink, you can just directly map the brain signal to control the physical arm of the robot. And that's a very meaningful thing. If, you know, folks that have spinal cord injury, one of the biggest requests is to be able to scratch yourself. It's something that quite annoying, actually. And if you have a scratch on your face, you can't fall asleep until you scratch it. You know, it's very convenient to be able to move something physically towards you, to be able to scratch similar things like eating food, you know, if you need somebody to feed you, very hard to have dinner with friends in a way that is, you know, sort of a normal social experience. And so if you can feed yourself, pick up a fork and actually eat a piece of chicken on your own, you know, that's a big deal. It prevents and saves a lot of interactions with caretakers and other people in your life that you rely on to take care of you. It really increases your.

I think an exciting possibility long term also is to say if you take parts of the optimus humanoid robot and you combine that with a neural link, let's say somebody has lost their arms or legs. Well, we could actually attach an optimus arm or optimus legs and do a neuralink implant so that the motor commands from your brain that would go to your biological arms, now go to your robot arms or robot legs. And again, you'd have basically cybernetic superpowers, actually.

So the latency from the neuralink to your hand would probably be slightly faster than it is just to go to your physical hand. So you can imagine, like if you're a piano player or, I don't know, anything that requires extremely fast hand movements, that you could actually have a pretty imbalanced right hand robotic arm control versus left hand physical arm control. That's one of them.

Yeah. Like I said, it's just kind of a cyberpunk deus example in the future where you have cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your biological limbs. And certainly we'll have a much, you know, as particularly as we expand to a large number of customers or patients for neuralink, the understanding of the brain will improve dramatically because really there isn't a fine, very fine grained understanding of the brain today because the sensors aren't good enough. You got fmri, which is pretty good, but it's still not as good as actually having high bandwidth electrodes in the brain.

[Matthew McDougall]

Yeah, I think this is underappreciated as a research tool to move that whole effort forward of really knowing what the physical substance of human thought is. We don't know to the degree that we need to. So neuralink is actually a very powerful research tool.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, I mean, I think we can ultimately understand and fix quite severe psychosis or like if somebody's got like the. If somebody's got like a.

[Matthew McDougall]

Like a delusion that they have a chip in their brain.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, I was wondering if you're going to mention that one. We just want to be clear. There's only one person with a neuralink chip in their brain. So for people out there who think we've put a chip in their brain, we'd like to assure you, for what it's worth, you probably won't believe us, but we did not put a chip in your brain. Okay.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Unnamed Announcer]

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[Matthew McDougall]

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[Unnamed Announcer]

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So there's actually a remarkable number of people who think we have put a trip in their brain, but we have not. But in the future, if you would like us to put a chip in your brain, which will perhaps help with the issue of thinking that you have a chip in your brain, then we will be able to do so. There are people that have severe schizophrenia. They've got basically things that their brain is malfunctioning in some way, and this is actually due to, really, physical circuitry issues. You can think of the brain as really. It's a biological computer, and if some of the circuits are crossed, it's gonna, you know, it's gonna crash or it's gonna have issues that cause it to not work. But with a neuralink device, we can fix those issues and, you know, give someone who I think has, say, severe schizophrenia or psychosis of some kind, allow them to live a normal life. I think that is one of the likely things in the future. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, you can certainly imagine, like, I'm sure people have, like, parents, grandparents, who have memory that's not working as well as it used to be. Sometimes they forget who. Who their grandchildren are or what day it is. And this is something that, on your linked device, could help fix.

[DJ Sull]

I mean, that's actually one of the personal reason, in many way, like, forms of. You're literally losing your mind and part of your identity, which is just a very, very difficult.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah. And it's really just. It's a glitch in the biological computer that is a fixable glitch. Like, it's a short circuit, essentially.

How does the device charge and how long does the charge last?

Yeah.

So the current version that Nolan has lasts between four to five hours on a single charge, and it takes about 45 minutes to charge. Something we've learned from Noland is that that's actually one of the main limiters for him using it more. It's actually pretty hard to use a product more than, like, 70 hours a week.

But that's about what he has used it for in some weeks.

Yeah, 70 hours. I mean, just for context, like, you sleep roughly eight hours a night. So that's, you know, we're doing better than the bed. The bed is 56 hours a week of use, roughly. And so 70 hours a week of uses. I challenge you to think about products that you've actually used for that duration.

But that's. Again, some of these points are worth, like, emphasizing again, like that Nolan, our first neuralink recipient, has used the Neuralink device for 70 hours in a week, which is incredible.

You probably won't enjoy that I'm sharing his computer use publicly, but I assure you it's for productive things only. But actually, so one of the things we've learned is that in the next version of the device we really need to like double or increase that battery life. And so I think dj, the next version is going to be double.

[DJ Sull]

Actually, actually double without increasing the charge.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Correct. Same charging time, double the battery life, meaning you should get roughly eight hours of use.

[DJ Sull]

And the goal is to actually get to all day use. So you can just charge maybe in your sleep. Sleeping pillow.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Exactly. As soon as you've got like 16 hours of usage, then you basically have 24 hours of usage because it can charge while you're sleeping.

One other thing that's important, I think to call out here is if you're paralyzed, you can't put the charger over your head yourself. And so it's important to think about it's not just duration of better use, but also can you recharge it yourself independently. So we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make that feasible because then that means that you can. This is what no one does. You can use the device, charge it, use the device, charge it, use the device without needing anybody to come in and sort of help you with that. Which is a big deal if you're trying to play civ until 5am at night when your family's asleep.

[DJ Sull]

And the way in which he does that is that there is a charger coil that's a bigger, you know, about this big. And we actually put it in the sleeve of a hat or a beanie. And then he wears it and then says with the voice command, charge, charge your energetic guys.

[Unnamed Announcer]

That's the one he likes.

How would writing work? So yeah, the current device that Nolan has is reading. So it's trying to read his essentially like wrist movement from one hand. That's also worth pointing out, like in the future it would be pretty cool to give Nolan to a second implant that would allow the other hand to be used and also have higher, obviously higher active electrode count. So then you could play to essentially play games two handed, because that's normally how you play games. But then with writing it's really just. It's an electrical impulse. Instead of like reading electrical impulses from the neurons, you issue an electrical impulse which is obviously critical for vision. So vision is, is writing, which is just triggering electrical impulse in the vision part of the brain. And that activates a pixel. So we actually do have this working in monkeys. We've had it working with monkeys for a while now where you can sort of flash a pixel and then you watch where the monkey, obviously the monkey is like, what's surprised to see, like, hey, there's a flash here and a flash. But it's gets used to it after a while. But it just. You can see that the pixel is in the right location because the monkey's eyes will dart to that location.

It's not on, on the screen, right? There's no pixel on the screen.

There's no pixel on the screen. Yeah, yeah, just like, just verify that you're triggering a pixel in the right part of the brain. So, you know, the initial resolution for vision will be relatively low, you know, sort of Atari graphics type of thing. But over time it could potentially be better than normal vision.

[DJ Sull]

And then I guess in terms of some additional applications for where writing to the brain can be useful is motor applications. As Bliss mentioned, there is need feedback. There's a proprioceptive feedback, there's a tactile.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Feedback, especially for a robot arm. Like if you're trying to grasp a cup, you need to know you got it.

One, one egg cups an egg.

[DJ Sull]

It's a very much a delicate balance of not just initiating the movement, but getting the feedback and controlling it accordingly. So there is a metasensory cortex that's right adjacent to motor cortex that could be beneficial motor movements.

[Unnamed Announcer]

So any changes in neural growth after the device is inserted? We don't see any signs of neural damage, but. And I guess we, we have seen some rebound on some of the electrodes, right? Correct.

[DJ Sull]

And then also, I mean, I guess, I guess, you know, brain is very.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Plastic, so it's not that plastic.

[DJ Sull]

Well, it does diminish quite a bit.

[Matthew McDougall]

After age 10, 20, throughout childhood, especially when you get to about 25. Brain really done cooking.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah.

[Matthew McDougall]

But there is a little bit of damage done with each insertion, but it's a minuscule amount compared to anything else out there. And so it's an easy amount of damage recover from. And it's really only detectable on cutting pieces of the brain after the animal is no longer alive and looking at them under a microscope, you can't really tell during life that there's been any brain.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Another way to interpret this question, have you found any changes in neural growth after the device is inserted? One way to interpret that is like the user learning how to use the device. And I think on that side of things, there's been tremendous Progress. He's put in hundreds of hours trying to figure out the best way to use this device because he really thinks that if he can figure this out, he can help share this knowledge. I mean, he's like, on Friday night at 8:00pm, you know, he's starting a session of like, you know, figuring out himself how to. How to push his own performance to the next level. And that's really a unique learning process because there's not many people in the world that had the experience of moving something with Ukraine. And so there's a lot of nuance to like, okay, how exactly should I imagine or attempt to move my wrist to get the thing to move. Yeah, he's really dialed that into a.

[DJ Sull]

Also just the sheer number of hours that he's saying, even in the past six months.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Right.

[DJ Sull]

In many ways, like, I mean, he's using it in his travel and his plane. Right. Effectively, PCI has left the lab.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, one of the questions is, how close are we converting thoughts into text? I mean, right. Right now it's more about moving curse from the screen on a virtual keyboard. But long term, you should be able to really transmit entire words faster than anyone could possibly type.

Enable the type. Hello, world today. But we're still in the early days of making that a polished experience again.

[DJ Sull]

I mean, the other things that we're looking at is sign language, right?

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah.

[DJ Sull]

At the end of the day, it is a movement of a hand into words.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, that's true.

[Matthew McDougall]

Is the brain trying to naturally push the threads out? I mean, this is sort of a universal feature of any implant in the body. The body tries to reject it. And the goal of the surgeons and the technology team is to fight that. And so with artificial hips and with, you know, screws in the spine, we've done a really good job of finding biocompatible materials and techniques to fix those implants in the body. I mean, past a certain age, it's getting hard to find someone without some kind of implant, you know, a knee, hip, some kind of screws in their spine. And so we've got this problem pretty well solved. So to answer your question, yes, the body is trying to get rid of any implant, but we can ensure that basically can't.

[DJ Sull]

It's also worth highlighting that the threads have not actually moved in the past five months. There's some still minor movements in terms of, like, some maybe getting pushed in a little bit, pushed out a little bit, but it's more or less very stable and been stable for months. And the Reason for that is once you do a brain surgery, it takes some time for the tissues to come in and then the heart tissue or the neomembrane to actually come in and then anchor the threads in place. And once that happens, everything has been stable and seen much movement.

[Matthew McDougall]

That's where the world record performance starts to come in.

[DJ Sull]

Yeah, that was a couple weeks ago.

[Unnamed Announcer]

It is important that the threads be extremely tiny. If they're extremely tiny, then the brain does not. The smaller they are, the less likely the brain is to react to them. So that's why you want the threads to be extremely tiny and also to minimize any damage to neurons.

[DJ Sull]

On that note, we do plan to actually share some of the tissue response in detail in some of the later upcoming updates.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, it is quite a challenging. It's challenging on many fronts to do something like this because you're trying to read and write electrical signals, but you need to have the threads themselves need to be electrically isolated and not subject to corrosion in the body. So like the just metal by itself is somewhat subject to corrosion or being attacked. So like in terms of the various coatings and things, to actually make this electrode work while not actually eroding its performance over time is very difficult.

[DJ Sull]

Human body is a very, very harsh environment.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Very harsh environment.

[DJ Sull]

It's a bag of salt water with bad sensors. That's elevated temperature that is well regulated. I'm sure people have experienced dropping their electronic devices in a seawater and in an instant.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Yeah, yeah. So we'll sort of wrap this up soon. I don't know if there's like a few last questions. Yes, so a good question. So what about upgrades? So yeah, we do think it's going to be important to be able to upgrade the device over time. Just like you wouldn't want like an iPhone one stuck in your brain forever. You know, if you've got an iPhone 15, you probably want the iPhone 15, not the iPhone one. So I think people over time will be able to upgrade their neuralink. So we'll take the neuralink device out and put a new one in. And we have done this with some of our animals and they've actually. In one case we did it with. We upgraded device three times and with.

A pig, we did with a monkey as well. He's able to do pci.

Yes, he's doing fine.

[DJ Sull]

Pedro has a simplified.

[Unnamed Announcer]

He actually hit his.

[DJ Sull]

I think his record though last with an upgrade.

[Matthew McDougall]

No, it still beat him though.

[Unnamed Announcer]

Still beat him. Yes, this is true. Humans are top of the species leaderboard right now.

Pedro's like, what, like 8 or something?

Pedro's like 8.5 bps. Okay, well, that's a very high score.

Yeah.

I'm not trying to put Pedro down. And also, to train a monkey to do that is, like, a whole challenge on its own. We have, like, the best animal care team in the world.

Yeah. I just do want to emphasize we do our absolute best to take care of the animals. And when we had, like, a USDA inspector come through, she said that this was the nicest animal facility she has ever seen in her entire life.

I mean, they serve breakfast on an app.

The monkey orders room service.

Yes. I'm not even kidding.

Yeah, we have monkey room service, which is rare. We're the only ones who offer monkey room service. So we really do everything we can to maximize the welfare of the animals. All right. With that, thank you, everyone, for tuning in. Hope you found this interesting.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Matthew McDougall]

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[Unnamed Announcer]

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