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Neuralink’s AI brain chip records the brain activity of a pig named Gertrude, who has had the chip implanted in her skull for two months. Neuralink / YouTube
- Neuralink, the neural technology company founded by Elon Musk in 2016, held a live demo Friday showing his ability to read the brain activity of a pig with a surgically implanted chip that transmits data wirelessly.
- Musk described Neuralink AI-powered “brain chip” as “a Fitbit in your skull with little wires” and predicted that the technology could one day give people telepathy, cure paralysis or allow superhuman vision.
- But scientists who saw the demo said that Neuralink didn’t show anything that groundbreaking, and that it is still a long way from using the chip in humans or living up to Musk’s ambitious claims.
- Here’s what you need to know about Friday’s demo, the technology and the company behind it, and what the future holds for “brain-machine interfaces.”
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
What is the technology that Neuralink is developing?
Neuralink, a neural technology startup Musk co-founded in 2016, has been working on a “brain-machine interface” that consists of a small chip implanted in the skull that can read and write brain activity.
Musk described the chip, which Neuralink displayed Friday during its live demo, as something like “a Fitbit in your skull with little wires.”
The coin-sized chip connects to ultra-thin, flexible wires (each about 5 microns thick, about 20 times thinner than a human hair) that contain a total of 1,024 electrodes and fan out within the brain. . Those electrodes can theoretically read or write brain activity by detecting or stimulating neurons, all while transmitting the data wirelessly via Bluetooth-like radio waves so that researchers can analyze it.
Neuralink has also developed a precision robot to surgically install the chip under the skull and feed the wires into the brain so as not to damage it by accidentally puncturing blood vessels, a procedure Musk claimed takes only hours and leaves nothing more than a tiny scar.
Neuralink’s artificial intelligence brain chip, which is about the size of a coin. Neuralink / YouTube
What does or could the Neuralink chip actually do?
Musk, unsurprisingly, has made some wild claims about the potential of the technology.
According to his predictions, it could: create “symbiosis” between the human mind and computers; “shed some light on consciousness”; allow people to “save and reproduce memories”; cure paralysis, blindness, memory loss and other neurological diseases; enable “superhuman vision” or give people the ability to summon their Tesla telepathically.
“Yeah, this sounds more and more like an episode of ‘Black Mirror,'” Musk acknowledged during Friday’s show.
While neuroscientists said that Neuralink appears to be a long way from fulfilling some of Musk’s most ambitious promises, they are optimistic that brain-machine interfaces could be used in the not-too-distant future to treat some neurological problems such as spinal cord injuries. . or Parkinson’s, or to control prostheses.
“Diseases in which we understand [neurological] circuit and what exactly that circuit is doing are potential applications, “Dr. Jason Shepherd, associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, told Business Insider.
But other neurodegenerative disorders, such as dementia, are more difficult to address, he said, because “there is complex behavior, there is complex learning and memory or aspects that are not regulated by a single area of the brain.”
Images of a Neuralink chip surgically implanted in the brain of a test animal. Neuralink / YouTube
What did Musk show on Friday?
Neuralink gave viewers a strange and slightly dystopian demonstration in which it used its chip to analyze the brain activity of pigs, which are often used in research because their brains more closely resemble the anatomy of human brains.
Friday’s demonstration involved several pigs: “Joyce,” who did not have an implanted chip; “Dorothy,” who had one, but has since been taken away (which Musk said was important because it showed they could remove it if you change your mind or want to “update”); “Gertrude”, who has a chip for two months; and several others with implanted “dual” chips.
Attendees were then able to see and hear “real-time signals” from Gertrude’s Neuralink, which was set to detect “spikes” of neural activity in her snout so that the screen would light up and sounds played while she smelled food around her pen.
Musk also showed a video of one of the pigs on a treadmill where the company tried to predict the position of the pig’s limbs by detecting its brain activity, which he claimed it did almost perfectly.
Of course, working with pigs still has several important steps away from humans, both in terms of technical hurdles and regulatory approval. On that front, Musk said Neuralink had obtained “breakthrough device” approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which can help accelerate the research and development behind new medical technologies.
Finally, the Neuralink team provided some limited technical details about the materials used in the chip and the cables, as well as the speed and resolution at which the chip can read and write data.
There was a lot of buzz around the demo – was there anything really new?
Not really, at least as far as people could get from just watching the demo, although scientists and engineers would certainly love to see Neuralink publish more research on its chip, materials science, and algorithms to back up some of the story. hype Musk has created. .
“All of the technology that he showed has already been developed in some way,” Shepherd said. “Basically what they’ve done is package it in a nice little format that then sends data wirelessly.”
Neuralink’s work builds on work that neuroscientists and bioengineers have been doing for decades, who in recent years have made breakthroughs such as mind-controlled robotic arms.
“If you just saw this presentation, you’d think it came out of nowhere, that Musk is doing this magic, but actually, he really copied and pasted a lot of work from many, many labs that have been working on this,” Shepherd said.
Still, Musk’s enthusiasm for the topic and deep pockets will likely generate additional interest from investors and the public alike, which could be a boon for other neuroscience work, he added.
Scientists have been impressed before with some of Neuralink’s advancements, most notably with the “sewing machine” it developed to insert ultra-thin wires into the brain.
“Doing these things by hand, these are very good things … it’s very difficult to have a firm enough hand to do these things manually,” Andrew Hires, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, told Business Insider in July. 2019 after Neuralink published new research and claimed that he had gotten a monkey to control a computer.
What challenges still need to be overcome by Neuralink and other brain-machine interface researchers?
Depending on what they want to use the technology for, researchers and tech startups working on brain chips still face a variety of challenges.
One of the most important is the development of materials that can be safely inserted into the human brain for long periods of time without deteriorating or causing infection.
Others include making chips that can read data fast enough and at high enough resolution to be useful, designing algorithms that can accurately interpret the data, and designing a way to insert the wires deeper into the brain so that the chip can access more of your activity. .
There are also major security, privacy, political, legal, and ethical issues that are sure to come up. Obviously, implanting a chip in the head of someone that reads their raw brain data, and allows them to control their physical movements, sight, smell, or hearing through a mobile app – using Musk that Neuralink is tracking – could go very wrong.
“Many of these types of companies are caught between the development stage and the implementation stage,” said Shepherd. “And from my point of view, I think the development stage of this is very premature, there is still a lot of work to do.”
Neuralink could also face some of its own unique challenges. STAT News reported earlier this week that several former Neuralink researchers expressed concern about a chaotic culture within the company characterized by a clash between tight deadlines and the slower pace typical of scientific research.
They told STAT that the company is using the technology’s favorite “move fast and break things” approach to building a medical device, and that “the strategy is very immature at times.”
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