Welcome, I hope this is working. Welcome to neural link up live
update. We're going to tell you about
the progress of the first patient with neural link and
sort of your recap of of the progress there.
Then talk about what changes we were 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 Telepathy, 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?
Hi everyone, My name is DJ Saul. I'm an electrical engineer and a
chip designer. By training.
I led the design of first several generations of the
Neurolink implant. Currently I was on the founding
team and currently a President. I'm Matthew McDougal.
I'm a practicing neurosurgeon and head of Neurosurgery at
Neurolink. Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. Head of Branding Interfaces
applications. And I'm bliss.
I'm a software engineer at Neurolink trying to figure out
how to turn brand 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 sort of
like I said, we call telepathy, which is enables the person with
Neuralink implant to control their phone or computer just by
thinking. And once you can control your
phone or computer, you can essentially control almost
anything just 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, you know, imagine
if he if he could communicate at the same speed as someone who
had 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 a, it's part of our
overall goal of enabling a very high bandwidth connection
between the brain and, and your and the rest of the world and
your computers. The long term goal to which
sounds a little esoteric, is to mitigate the the risk of, of the
civil civilizational risk of AI by having a sort of closer
biosis between human intelligence and digital
intelligence. But that, that'll take many
years along the way, we're, we're going to help solve a lot
of brain injury or spinal injury issues.
So, and then with our first product apathy, that's, that's
going to be really quite profound that there is also
potential long term for bridging the gaps or if 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 that is
something that is possible in the long term.
And then our second product, which we've demonstrated to work
with monkeys is Blind side, 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 let's just give you a sense of what the device is a way to
think about the neural link device is kind of like a a
Fitbit or an Apple Watch with with tiny wires or electrodes.
Those those tiny wires are implanted in the in the brain
and they read and write electrical signals.
So a lot of people think the brain is incredibly mysterious
thing. It's it, it is mysterious in a
lot of ways, but but it is actually, it does operate with
like electrical signals. So if you can read and write
those electrical signals, you can interface with the brain.
And the devices is sized so that it is the same size as the as
the piece of skull that is removed.
So it's like a few centimeters diameter of skull that's
removed. We replaced that with the device
after implanting the tiny wires with a surgical robot and that
enables read write capability to the neurons.
Completely wirelessly. Yeah, yes, exactly.
It's completely wirelessly. So like I could I could have a
neural link right now, you wouldn't know.
And it charges inductively. So you could just basically have
an electromagnetic ad that you charge the device with.
So yeah, it's like an Apple Watch.
Exactly so. Except that it's actually a much
harder technical challenge to solve given that there's limit
as to how much heat the brain tissue whereas in for phones.
And have a hot watch. Or whatever you really care how
much if it's sitting on a table. Sure.
Yeah, it's also it's got to go through scan and stuff as well
in our case. So it is a tougher challenge to
to charge and to have I bandwidth communications given
that it's got to go through skin and hair and stuff.
We have solved it. We have solved it, yeah.
So yeah. Yeah.
So our first step with the telepathy is basically to unlock
digital independence for people with policies and to allow them
to control the computer just with their mind without moving
the 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. And it's not a high bar for.
You 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, you know, thinking about how to move the cursor and
playing Civilization. No eye tracker.
Right, there's no eye tracking from I.
Mean he's lost. He's lost Junior.
He's like, he's going to watch this on Twitter.
Just thinking that's it. Just.
Thinking like just a couple days.
Like cursor move here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is like last night or two nights ago something.
Yeah. I think I think the way he also
described it is he's using the. 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 multi time. Yeah, you guys like if you join
this live stream, you can ask him questions, he'll he'll tell
you all about what it's like to move.
Also I think I haven't played civilization myself but I think
this is actually not easy mode. This is expert this.
Is emperor mode emperor mode? If you have played stiff emperor
mode, it's like the highest difficulty level.
Just the point is like this is a commonly demanding task while
live streaming playing the hardest mode of team and he's
able to do that while moving. Talking, engaging with you know
the audience while playing. 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, yeah. Which requires an incredibly
high fidelity degree of control and and speed of control in
order to be able to win. So also another cool stuff about
about our device is that we can use it anywhere, anytime, also
on a plane, during a flight, while creating really cool means
of care. Also, our device unlocks things
that previously were impossible for our participants.
For example, we're able to connect him to his gaming
consoles, which they Mario Kart with friends and family, and it
was lovely to see them playing together after years that he
couldn't do it since he's injured.
Imagine if you're sitting umbrella over from the sky on a
plane. You 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 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 we use the device daily and weekly.
And we track it weekly since the since the surgery and on weeks
that he's not too busy and not travelling, he can even reach 70
hours of using the device a week.
This is amazing and he would of course love to use it more, but
need to run recent 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, I think.
That maybe not obvious to people who are watching this.
Like it's a normal MacBook he's controlling.
This isn't like some limited efficient thing, but there's
only a few options like 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 brain control, he was able to break the previous
world record for cursor control is by using the brain.
And recently he even doubled it and was able to outperform about
10% of our engineered neurolink. 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, 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 but it's it's it's it's
actually, even though it sounds silly, it's it's quite a yeah,
it can be quite a it sounds like it could be quite addictive.
And it's especially if you get a low score and you think there's
no way I got a. So I, I mean, anyone who wants
to try this, I recommend going to theneurolink.com website and
seeing, seeing if you can beat Nolan's record.
And it's that you will find that'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 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, you know, the media has a
habit of of saying that the glass is 10% empty, but but
actually it's 90% full. So I think it's really quite an
accomplishment of the neural link team to have achieved with
first with the first patient, the first device twice the world
record for the range computer bandwidth.
That's really an astonishing, an amazingly great outcome and it's
only going to be get better from here.
So the potential is to ultimately get, I think to
megabit level. So that's, that's part of the
long term goal of, of improving the, the bandwidth of the brain
computer interface. If you think about like how low
the bandwidth normally is between a human and a device,
it's the average bandwidth is extremely low.
It's it's, I said less than one 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 any
given device except in perhaps very rare circumstances.
So the this is actually quite important for for AI, you know,
basically for for human AI, symbiosis is just being able to
communicate at A at a speed. Yeah, I can follow.
So yeah, just to emphasize again, he's 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. 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. Now that air pocket we think may
have contributed to eating up some of the thread slack is 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, you know, odd looking shape.
The folds of the brain travel down deep into the brain and 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 travelling 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.
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 is constantly moving and you
want the electrodes to be moving with the brain, causing less of
the scarring. And it's actually impossible for
a human neurosurgeon, however talented Matthew is to actually
maneuver them by. So we have a surgical robot that
we built that can actually precisely target them in any 3
dimensional space, XY as well as Z with Micron level precision
while avoiding vasculature so that you don't disrupt the the
and and cause immune response from happening.
So we we actually have the technology to be able to place
them exactly where we want them in three.
Yeah, it was truly amazing to see the surface of the brain
after the robot had inserted all the electrodes on the 1st
participant without a drop of blood.
Insight. It's really quite an
achievement. Yes, something that probably
most people don't realize is that the 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, it's not
obvious, just looking at a say, a picture of the brain that,
that, that it's 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 like that kind of thing or
vision, it's actually quite precisely located.
It's not some people like might, might think, look at the brain
like, oh, it could be, it could be anywhere.
But actually we it's your brain is highly differentiated, even
though it doesn't look it's yeah.
Do you want to describe how we actually where like how we
identify where to drill the? Yeah.
So we can 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, you know,
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.
And so we have a pretty good idea based in, 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.
Yeah. But anyway, I think it's kind of
an important point that like, it's not like you're 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.
Precision is key too. 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, the actual lateral side to the hand.
That's atomic. Yeah, the left side of your
brain controls right side of your body.
Everything's crossed. Another of the risk mitigations
we're looking at in the future is that, you know that 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. If 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 or 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, eliminate some of
the tension on the threads and we think it will reduce some of
the tendency of threads to retract, right and.
We actually built a tool to do right.
Yeah, this is, this is actually, this is a very important detail.
You really want the the inner contour of the skull to be flush
so that the implant doesn't there's no the brain doesn't
want to pucker up into the into the gap.
That's really quite a big deal. So that like like minimize the
air pocket and the implant being flush with the the inside
contour of the skull is are two very important improvements.
The additional benefit here is that you know you do see some
amount of stick up, what we call stick up, so you minor bump in
the head, but this actually eliminates it even further.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like really our
goal is that, that if you run your hand over the top of the
skull, you don't feel any, any bump, you don't feel any, any
device. And that even if someone was
bald, you wouldn't really even notice it.
And and then from the the inner inner contour of the skull that
the the brain or physical standpoint doesn't really notice
that there's a divot in the skull because there's no divot.
OK. Another aspect of the 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 that 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 3mm in total as the heart beats
and and the breathing takes place.
And so that movement, you know it, 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, 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 the
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
from each thread. And so we're going to, you know,
both have more threads in the right layer and have better data
on how much retraction has occurred.
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 on depth. Right.
To be able to do this is actually pretty pretty novel.
Part of the robot. Yeah, the historical approach is
to actually pound in a sort of bed of nails with an air hammer
into the. Brain, it looks crazy that that
that is, Yeah, just with a with a pneumatic hammer.
That's the that's the this is it sounds come somewhat barbaric.
This is not what we do, but this is the what's been done before
is. They're literally just hammering
in what looks like a bed of nails with the brain.
Which? Actually works.
It's astonishing that it actually.
Works, but I mean some people like manual like DBS probes.
You're just sticking in by hand. Our research is just guiding
them in. Those are several, several
orders of magnitude more volume of brain tissue that you're
destroying compared to what we're doing.
But that deep brain simulation stuff does actually work, and it
actually helps people a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a great product. Yeah.
But I mean, I think we'll 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 the neural link 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.
They work that you won't even notice that someone even has the
device. So like I said, we're restoring
the ability to control your computer and phone.
That's how telepathy and then next device being able to allow
people to see that cannot see before.
And in fact, you could allow people to see kind of like Dora
the Forge in Star Trek in any but whatever.
Infrared. Yeah, infrared, ultraviolet,
radar. So.
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. And I also think, you know,
often times 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
you're on 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 of. Yeah, I mean, 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've got to be threads. You got to be in there.
So. But I just want to be emphasized
again, like the goal is to give people superpowers, not just to
restore prior functionality. So it's very exciting.
And I think 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 that's amazing. Yeah, I guess.
These. Off yeah and could can you
multitask but yeah in fact if you look at Nolan's streaming
and you can just check out Nolan's streams on on the X
platform he's multitasking all the time so he's playing video
games while talking and. Listening to podcasts?
Nice listening to podcasting. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So it's really just like if you,
you're using your hands and you, you can be, you know, playing a
video game while talking so. I mean, don't take that word for
it. Just go watch.
I mean, yeah, yeah, he's out there on the Internet doing his
thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So can he do keyboard shortcuts or is it just a mouse?
Yeah. That that's actually what we're
working on right now. Sure, so currently he's working
with the mouse, but we are also exploring and decoding more
dimensions from the neural activity.
Multiple clicks. So to do shortcuts or just able
to control more games, control games with an Xbox controller.
But also in the future we expand, we plan to expand to
decode text, not just the mouse control, but also allow our
participant to type much faster. And yeah.
Yeah, actually. So maybe going back to the
discussion of thread retraction, you know, one of the very
exciting parts to me about this story is that we're able to do
so much with 15% of channels. 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, like, you know, what an individual finger is trying
to do, you might or might not have an Electro next to it.
And the more channels you have in the brain, the higher
likelihood you have, you know, representation or decodability
of all fingers on the hand. It's like you're trying to do
something like output text at a fast rate.
It's something that matters a lot for people who are
completely locked in, who cannot speak at all, who are trying to,
you know, just say I love you to them, to a loved one in their
family or ask for a glass of water or a scratch or whatever.
You know, being able to type at a faster rate, it's extremely
important. And the more fingers you have
access to, higher probability, you can do that efficiently.
And so, yeah, you know, I'm super excited about how high the
ceiling is we can that we can get to as we resolve this
standard traction issue. Yeah, I mean we're like we're
currently at approximately 1010 bits per second be great.
But ultimately we want to get to megabit and I think say
ultimately whole brain interface.
I think you know, many years from now I think Gigabit level
is possible. So that's that's pretty
astonishing. Now you know with this is still
version one of our device, as we mentioned, it's version one with
only 15% of the threads working. The the current device has 64
threads with 16 electrodes on each thread.
Our next device has 128 threads with, with eight electrodes per
per thread. Because as we get more confident
about how, where exactly to place the the electrode the 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
accurate with the with the placement of of the threads and
then our next generation device will have maybe even.
More channels, Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so next device for
every four, yeah, 3000 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 in what kind of
bandwidth. So I think it won't be, it won't
be all that long before someone with a neural link device can
communicate faster than someone who is has a fully functional
body. And yeah, so I think, you know,
faster than the fastest speed typist or auctioneer.
The E sports tournaments are. Going to be won't be able to
speak faster than someone can communicate with a neural link
telepathy device. It may be 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 part of bandwidth, we need to
think about new ways to actually build the interface for the
devices. This is something that we can't
accept. Yeah, no, that's, that's a good
point because the the current import devices are centered
around human hands. Yeah.
So it's like we've got these, you know, little meat sticks
that we move and the this certain rate at which you can
move your little move your fingers.
And, and so we've got like the mouse and the keyboard and with
a joystick control, you know, like Xbox controller or
something like that. But you really don't need that.
You can actually, you don't, you don't need, since you're no
longer, if you're not trying to use your hands, you don't, you
actually don't need those conventional control mechanisms.
And so This is why like, ultimately I think you'll be
able to do conceptual telepathy like where you can communicate
entire concepts uncompressed to someone else with a neural link
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
clip. You don't have the
proprioceptive feedback of, you know, the keys under your
fingertips or the track pad under your.
There's all sorts of interesting UX challenges, how to actually
give the user some sense of what their decoder's actually doing,
or what the Neurlink's actually doing.
I mean, 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 in Yeah, we can
basically have this exposed as an HID interface if we want.
HID is just the name of the protocol for like sending fits
my mouse into a computer. Yeah, I can plug into basically
anything. Yeah.
I mean, I think we, we chose that interface because it's
ubiquitous. Yeah, basically any devices are,
are have Bluetooth capabilities. Our our long term goal is to
actually have our own protocol, you know, that is safe and
secure. But for now, you know we've
chosen it for interoperability. So the question is, can a neural
link chip repair the paralysis in the long term?
You know, we can't do that right now.
We have done sort of preliminary work implanting a second neural
link in the spinal cord and we can restore naturalistic looking
and, and leg movements in animal models.
But this isn't something that is, you know, don't, 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.
Yeah. I mean essentially to, to, I
mean, it there's, there's no, 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 the nerves are
damaged, essentially just it's basically a communications
bridge. So you bridge the communications
from the motor cortex past the the point in the neck or spine
where the nose is damaged and you should like it is physic it
is possible from a physics standpoint to restore full body
functionality from a physics standpoint, it's a very hard
technical problem, but it but it there is nothing that prevents
it happening from a physics standpoint.
So in terms of next phase of the rollout, well, we really want to
make sure that we make as much progress as possible between
each neural link patient. So this is we're only just
moving now to our second neural link patient, but we we hope to
have, you know, if things go well high single digits this
year. And I don't know maybe if this
is somewhat dependent on regulatory approval and how much
technical progress we make, but within a few years, hopefully
thousands. Yeah.
And I think one thing that is important to highlight is that,
you know, it's not that we've built only one device and one
surgery. We've done hundreds of surgery.
We've built thousands and thousands of devices even for
just the 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 well, yeah, go through obviously the
appropriate hurdles that are regulatory challenges and
proving out the device with. Yeah, and the, the, 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, a laser cutter by hand that that would
be crazy. But the ophthalmologist overseas
the, the LASIK machine and make sure that the settings are
correct and then the machine does everything and restores
your eyesight. It's really remarkable how how
many people have had their eyesight restored with, with
LASIK. And I think there's another one
called Smile. It's they, they keep making it
better. We need to have something
similar for a Neuralink implantation so that you
basically sit down and whatever the, the, whatever, whatever
kind of upgrades or, you know, brain fixes are needed.
That's that's reviewed by medical expert.
Obviously we want to make sure that that is reviewed correctly,
but but it really needs to be automatic.
So you sit down and and within 10 minutes you have a Neuralink
device installed very, very fast.
I mean, it's very sort of cyberpunk, you know, Deus Ex if
you played those games and. We'll Neuralink start to
interface with other devices like wheelchair.
It's great question. We currently focusing on
controlling computers and unlock independence in the virtual
world. Of course, our plan is as we
mentioned earlier, robotic arm and a wheelchair.
To unlock independence in the physical world is of course at
the additional risk if you make your computer.
There's some yeah to that, but we are working with the FDA to
allow us to be quite some. Well, it seems like if if the
wheelchair has a. An app.
Well, the wheelchair just need to have some have an interface.
It does, yeah. So wheelchair has a Bluetooth
interface. You could just Bluetooth
interface to the wheelchair and and that's probably something we
should do. We're working on pretty soon,
yeah. It's really a matter of
paperwork. I'm showing that you can do it
safely. You don't want to drive off.
A Cliff, Well, I think we could. Well, we can limit the speed.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
So it doesn't go careening often to disaster, but you know, so
just make it go slowly at first. But yeah, so being able to sort
of it really the New York device just should work generally for
anything that's got a Bluetooth. Interface, including potentially
an Optimus. Yes, yeah, you yes, you could
communicate with Optimus. Yep, absolutely Optimus.
We'll also be able to talk to Optimus.
But like, but you could just, yeah, instead of talking just,
you could just beam it directly. Or if, if someone has lost the
use of speech, then then they can still communicate to an
Optimist. They, they can communicate
telepathically to Optimists or by Bluetooth.
And, and, and so even if someone has, you know, completely less
the ability to speak, they could still control Optimist or their
computer or phone. I.
Mean also like if you have an optimist and you have a neuron,
you can just directly map the brain signal to control of the
physical arm of the robot. And that's a very meaningful
thing. Like if you're, 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 it,
But it really increases you. And I think an exciting
possibility long term also is to say if you take parts of the
Optimus Optimus humanoid robot and you combine that with a
neural link, let's say somebody has lost their arms or legs.
Well, we, we could actually attach an Optimus arm or Optimus
legs and do a neural link implant so that the, the motor
commands from your brain that go would go to your biological
arms. Now go to your robot arms or
robot legs. And again, you you'd have
basically cybernetic superpowers.
Actually, so the latency from the neural link 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 AI 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.
There's more. Yeah, like I said, it's just
kind of a cyberpunk Deus Ex in the future where you have
cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your
biological limbs. And it's, it's certainly the,
we'll have a much, you know, as as particularly as we expand to
a large number of of, of customers or patients for neural
link, 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, it's just the
sensors aren't good enough. You've got fMRI, which is pretty
good, but it's still not as good as actually having high
bandwidth electrodes in the brain.
Yeah, I think this is under appreciated as a research tool
to to move that whole effort forward of really knowing, you
know, what the physical substance of human thought is.
We don't know to the to the degree that we need to.
So Neuralink is actually a very powerful research tool.
Yeah, I mean, we, I think we can ultimately understand and and
fix it's quite severe psychosis or like if somebody's got like
the if somebody's got like a. Like a delusion that they have a
chip in their brain. Yeah.
I was wondering if you were going to mention that one.
We just want to be clear. There's only one person with a
new linked 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
or what it's worth, you probably won't believe us, but we did not
put a chip in your brain. OK, So there's actually a
remarkable number of people who think we have put a chip 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. So there are people that have
severe schizophrenia. They've got basically things
that their brain is malfunctioning in some way.
And, and this is actually due to really like physical circuitry
issues. You can think of the brain as
like really it's a, it's a biological computer.
And if some of the circuits are crossed, it's going to, you
know, it's going to crash or it's going to have issues that
was not work. But with a Neuralink device, we
can fix those issues and, you know, give someone who I think
has to 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've, you know, 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 I. Mean that that's actually one of
the personal reason in in in many way like forms of you're
you're literally losing your and then part of your right then,
which is a just a very, very. Yeah.
And it's really just, it's a glitch in the biological
computer that is a fixable glitch like, 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, it lasts for four to
five hours on a single charge, and it takes about 45 minutes to
charge. The thing we've learned from
Nolan 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 he used it for in some weeks.
Yeah, 70 hours in a week, Yeah. I mean, just for context, like
you sleep roughly 8 hours a night.
So that's, you know, we're doing better than the bed.
The bed is 56 hours a week if you use roughly.
And so 70 hours a week if uses. I challenge you to think about
products that you've actually used for that duration.
But that's OK. Some of these points are worth
like emphasizing again, like the that Nolan, our first neural
link recipient, has used the neural link device for 70 hours
in a week, which is incredible. You probably won't enjoy the
time sharing his computer use publicly, but I mean, I assure
use 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 you know, increase that battery
life. And so I think DJ, the next
version is going to be double. Actually actually double without
without increasing the charge. Correct in charging time to
double the battery life, meaning you should get roughly 8 hours
of use. And the goal is to actually get
to all they use so you can just charge, you know, maybe in your
sleep your. Sleeping pillow 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 of the things that's important, I think, to call out
here is if you're paralyzed, you can't, you know, put the charger
over your head yourself. And so it's important to think
about like it's not just a 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 save until 5:00 AM at night
when your family's asleep. And the way in which he does
that is that there is a charger coil that's a big or you know
about this big. And we actually put it in the
sleeve of a, of a hat, a little beanie or a beanie.
And then he wears it and then says with the voice command and
charge. Charger energized.
That's the one he likes, yeah. How would writing work?
So so yeah, the current device that Nolan has is reading.
So it's trying to read his essentially like worst movement
from from one one hand. That's also, you know, with
pointing out like in the future, like I think we're pretty cool
to you can build into a second implant that would allow the
other hand to be used and also have higher, obviously higher
active electrode count. So then you can play 2
essentially play games 200 because that's normally how you
play games. And but then with with writing,
it's really just it's an electrical impulse instead of
like reading electrical impulses from the neuron to you issue an
electrical impulse, which is obviously critical for vision.
So vision is, is writing, which is just training and electrical
impulse in the vision part of the brain.
And that like activates a pixel. So we, we actually do have this
working in monkeys. So we had, 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's like, what monkey's a little surprised to see like,
hey, there's a flash here and a flash here.
But it's gets used to it after a while.
But it just you can you can see that that the pixel is in the
right location because the monkey's eyes will dark to that
location. It's not on the screen, like
there's no pixel on the. Screen.
There's no pixel on the. Screen.
Yeah, just like. You just verify that that the
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. And then I guess in terms of
some additional applications for where writing to the brain can
be useful order applications as Bliss mentioned there is.
Feedback. There's a proprioceptive
feedback, there's a tactile feedback.
Especially for a robot arm, Like if you're trying to grasp a call
right, you need to know if you've got it.
Yeah, 1 to 1 egg. That's an egg, yeah.
It's a very much a delicate balance of not just initiating
the movement but getting the feedback and controlling it
accordingly. So there there is a some meta
sensory cortex that's right adjacent to motor cortex that
could could be beneficable. Motor movements, so any changes
in neural growth after device is inserted, we don't see any any
signs of neural damage. But I and I guess we, we have
seen some rebound on some of the electrodes, right?
Correct. And then also, I mean, I guess,
I guess, you know, rain is very plastic.
So it's not that plastic well. It does diminish quite a bit
after each and 20. Throughout childhood, actually,
when you get to about 25 rain really done cooking.
Yeah. But there are, there is a little
bit of damage done with each insertion, but it's a miniscule
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 after the animal's no longer alive and looking at them
under a microscope, you can't really tell during life that
there's been any brain. Good.
Another way to interpret this question, have there 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, you know,
if he can figure this out, he can help share this knowledge.
I mean, he's like on Friday night at 8:00 PM, 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. And so there's a lot of nuance
to like, OK, how exactly should I imagine or attempt to move my
wrist to get the thing to. Yeah, he's really dialed that
into a. Also, just the sheer number of
hours that he's using even in the past six months, right?
Yeah, in many ways. Like, I mean, he's using it in
his travel and in his plane, right?
Effectively, PCI has left the lab, yeah.
Yeah, 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 on a virtual keyboard,
but long term you should be able to really estimate entire words
faster than anyone could possibly type.
I'm able to type Hello World today, but we're still in the
early days making that a posh experience.
I. Mean the other things that we're
looking at is sign language, right?
At the end of the day, it is a movement of and into, right?
Yeah, it's true. Was 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, 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. It's also worth highlighting
that the threads have not actually moved in the past five
months. There's, there's some still
minor movements in terms of like some maybe maybe getting pushed
in a little bit, pushed out a little bit, but it's, it's more
or less very stable and been stable for.
And the reason for that is, you know, once you, once you do a
brain surgery, it takes some time for the tissues to come in
and then, and then you know, our tissue or the neo membrane to
actually come in and then anchor the threats in place.
And once that happens, everything has been stable and
seen much movement. That's where the world record
performance starts to come. In Yeah, that was a couple weeks
ago. Yeah, the threats, like it is
important that the threats 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
to them. So that's why you want the
threats to be extremely tiny and also to minimize any damage to
neurons, so. On that note, we do plan to
actually share some of the, you know, the tissue response in
detail and some of the the later upcoming updates.
Yeah, it is quite a challenging, it's challenging on many fronts
to do something like this because you're, you're trying to
read and read and write electrical signals, but you need
to have the, the threads themselves need to be like
electrically isolated and and not subject to corrosion in the
body. So like the, you know, just
metal by itself is somewhat subject to corrosion or, or
being attacked. So it's it's, it's like in terms
of the various coatings and things to actually make this
electrode work while not actually eroding its performance
over time is, is very difficult. Human bodies are very, very
harsh environment, very harsh environment.
It's a it's a bag of salt water with bad sensors that's elevated
temperature that is well regulated.
I mean, I'm sure people have experienced dropping their
electronic devices in a sea water and in an instant.
Yeah, yeah. So we'll sort of wrap wrap this
up soon if there's like a few few last questions, I guess.
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 1 stuck in your brain forever.
You know, if you've got an iPhone 15, you probably want the
iPhone 15, not the iPhone 1. So I think people over time will
be able to upgrade their neural link.
So we'll take the neural link device out and put a new one in.
And we have done this with some of our animals and they're
actually in one case we did with we upgraded device three times
and so with a pig. We did with a monkey as well.
Monkey is able to do PCI. Yeah, and he's doing fine.
Pager has the latest implant. Actually, he hit his, I think
his record with the last, yeah. With the with an upgrade.
No, it still beat him though Will.
It still beat him. Yes, this is true.
Humans are top of the species leaderboard right now.
Pager's like what? Like 8 or something.
Pager's like 8.5 BPS, OK, but it's a very high score, yeah.
I'm not trying to put Pager down.
And also to train a monkey to do that, It's like a whole
challenge on it's own. We have like the best animal
care team world. Yeah, I just do 1/2 size.
We, we, 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 the nicest animal facility she's ever seen
in her entire life. So.
Breakfast on an app like. The the the monkey orders room
service. Yeah.
We're, we're, we're monkey room service, which is rare.
Like we're the only ones who offer monkey room service.
So we really do everything we can to maximize the welfare of
the animals. So all right, with that, thank
you everyone for tuning in. Hope you found this interesting.