According to company boss Elon Musk, its Neuralink implant is now at work in a second patient, and this time, almost half of the device’s electrodes are working.
During a podcast discussion, which also featured Neuralink’s first human subject, Noland Arbaugh, Musk said, “We’ve got, I think, on the order of 400 electrodes that are providing signals.”
The current version of Neuralink’s N1 implant has 1024 electrodes over 64 threads designed to measure brain activity. After some promising initial results, approximately 85 percent of the threads connecting the device to Arbaugh’s brain came loose, significantly reducing the system’s capabilities.
Arbaugh told the podcast host, Lex Fridman, his experience of the threads retracting: “It sucked. It was really, really hard.”
“I thought it would’ve been a cruel twist of fate if I had gotten to see the view from the top of this mountain and then have it all come crashing down after a month.”
The Neuralink team made some changes to how the behavior of individual neurons was measured, and while Arbaugh is not back to where he was in the early days of his implant, he described the update as a “light bulb moment.”
As for the update itself, Neuralink’s Brain Interface Software Lead, Bliss Chapman, described it as “an over-the-air software update to his implants, same way you’d update your Tesla or your iPhone.”
Musk said of the latest person to receive the implant: “I don’t want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant. So, there’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well.”
Unsurprisingly, Musk then let loose with hyperbole in describing his hopes for the future of the technology, getting to 100 bits per second in the coming years. “Maybe in five years from now, we might be at a megabit, faster than any human could possibly communicate by typing or speaking.”
According to Musk, the technology could vastly increase the bandwidth of human-to-human communication—assuming, of course, the humans in question had received the Neuralink implant.
Musk said, “The long term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication. Because, even in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words.
“If the AI can communicate at terabits per second, and you’re communicating at bits per second, it’s like talking to a tree.” ®
