Elon Musk says Neuralink has added a second human volunteer to its experimental N1 brain-computer interface (BCI) and that it’s “working very well.” But like the coin-sized device in the company’s first patient, only a fraction of the electrodes are reported to be working well.
“I don’t want to spoil it but it seems to have gone very well with the second installation,” Neuralink’s CEO said in an August 2 podcast interview with computer scientist Lex Fridman. “There’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It works very well. ”
“Many electrodes” is no doubt a relative number, however. During a lengthy interview with Fridman, Musk clarified that while the initial results appear “so far, they are very good,” he only estimates that 400 of the 1,024 BCI electrodes implanted in the cortex of The user currently provides the signals. While that’s about a 10 percent improvement over the 80-85 percent electrode failure rate reported by Neuralink’s first volunteer, it points to major challenges still facing the technology that Musk said predicted that it would become like telepathy within just a few years.
[Related: 85% of Neuralink implant wires are already detached, says patient.]
“Imagine if Stephen Hawking could speak faster than a speed typist or a salesman. That’s the goal,” Musk wrote on his social media platform, X, in January 2024.
Earlier this year, reports confirmed as many as 870 electrodes were completely blocked in Neuralink’s first patient, Noland Arbaugh, after the implant was inserted into his skull up to three times. a company prospect. Arbaugh, a 30-year-old man with quadriplegia, explained The Wall Street Journal at which point he began to experience reduced BCI functionality after initially allowing him to control computer hardware and a mouse pad using his thoughts. Arbaugh said Neuralink didn’t feel comfortable doing another brain surgery to remove the implant, and instead spent weeks developing a solution. Finally, the engineers made changes to the recording algorithm that made the implant listen to human neural signals, improved the methods of translating these signals into cursor movements, and improved the user interface. .” There is currently no information that explains exactly what caused Arbaugh’s electrodes to go off, or if these malfunctioning parts could cause health problems in the future.
Neuralink faced numerous regulatory delays and investigations into animal rights violations and safety concerns in the years leading up to its first human trials. In 2023, an animal rights advocacy group warned volunteers against signing up for the company’s PRIME study, saying they “should have serious concerns” about the safety of the device.
Musk stopped short of elaborating on what caused the new problems during last Friday’s podcast appearance, and instead focused on the lofty goal of Neuralink’s future patients — including eight other volunteers are scheduled to receive N1 equipment by the end of the year. He confirmed that even with a performance of 10-15 percent in Arbaugh’s installation, the engineers “were able to achieve a computer scale in a second”.
Then Musk said this was “double the world record,” though it’s not clear what he meant. In 2017, researchers at Stanford University published a clinical study describing the results for three patients who underwent earlier tests of a different BCI. Although they were implanted and had physical wires, two ALS patients achieved rates of 2.2 and 1.4 bits-per-second computing, while another volunteer with dementia Lou Gerig recorded 3.7 clips per second—four times the previous speed record at the time.
“For years, it’s going to be big,” Musk said on Friday. “… I think we’re going to start exceeding the world record by orders of magnitude in the coming years…. up to, I don’t know, 100 bits per second, [a] a thousand.”
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