Elon Musk has confirmed that Neuralink has successfully installed its implant into a second human participant. Musk disclosed this development on a ridiculously-long podcast with Lex Fridman.
Fridman started the podcast by congratulating Musk on the historic milestone of Neuralink’s first human implant. “Thanks,” Musk responded, before adding, “And we just obviously have our second implant as well.”
When asked about the success of the second procedure, Musk noted, “So far, so good. It looks like we’ve got, I think, on the order of 400 electrodes that are providing signals.”
Fridman asked about the scalability of human participants for Neuralink. Musk said, “It depends somewhat on the regulatory approval, the rate at which we get regulatory approvals. So, we’re hoping to do 10 by the end of this year, total of 10. So, eight more.”
As the conversation continued, Fridman pointed out the importance of learning from each implant, stating, “With each one, you’re going to be learning a lot of lessons about the neurobiology of the brain, everything. The whole chain of the Neuralink, the decoding, the signal processing, all that kind of stuff.”
Musk agreed, emphasizing that the process would improve with each 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,” he said.
Regarding future advancements, Musk predicted significant improvements. “In years, it’s going to be gigantic, because we’ll increase the number of electrodes dramatically. We’ll improve the signal processing,” he stated.
Musk highlighted that with only roughly 10-15% of the electrodes working with the first patient, they achieved a data transfer rate of a bit per second, which is double the previous world record.
“I think we’ll start vastly exceeding the world record by orders of magnitude in the years to come. So, start getting to, I don’t know, 100 bits per second, thousand. Maybe if five years from now, we might be at a megabit, faster than any human could possibly communicate by typing, or speaking,” Musk concluded.
The Neuralink implant goes into the brain and has Bluetooth so it can connect to an iPhone. The first Neuralink patient, Noland Arbaugh, has been able to control his MacBook Pro with his brain, just by thinking about what he wants to control. He also spoke extensively with Fridman on his podcast.
Argbaugh detailed the functionality of the Link app, used to calibrate Neuralink.
“For people who don’t know, can you explain how the Link app works?” Fridman asked.
Arbaugh responded, “Yeah, so it’s just an app that Neuralink created to help me interact with the computer. On the Link app, there are a few different settings, and different modes, and things I can do on it. So there’s the body mapping, which we kind of touched on. There’s a calibration. Calibration is how I actually get cursor control, so calibrating what’s going on in my brain to translate that into cursor control.”
He explained the calibration process further, “It will pop out models. What they use, I think, is time. So it would be five minutes and calibration will give me so good of a model, and then if I’m in it for 10 minutes and 15 minutes, the models will progressively get better. And so the longer I’m in it, generally, the better the models will get.”
Fridman noted, “That’s really cool because you often refer to the models. So the model’s the thing that’s constructed once you go through the calibration step.” Arbaugh added, “Yeah.”
Arbaugh said the classic game Snake is used to test the models (hello, Nokia phone users). “Snake is kind of like my litmus test for models. If I can control a snake decently well then I know I have a pretty good model,” he said.
The Link app includes features like Webgrid and voice controls. “It’s also how I connect to the computer just in general. So they’ve given me a lot of voice controls with it at this point. So I can say, ‘Connect,’ or, ‘Implant disconnect,’ and as long as I have that charger handy, then I can connect to it,” Arbaugh explained. He added that the implant must be woken up from hibernation mode using the charger.
Fridman inquired about the calibration process, to which Arbaugh responded, “It’s a bubble game. So there will be yellow bubbles that pop up on the screen. At first, it is open loop.” He admitted that he still doesn’t fully understand the open loop and closed loop concepts.
When Fridman asked if body mapping was part of the data collection or calibration, Arbaugh replied, “Yeah, it is. It’s something that they want me to do daily, which I’ve been slacking on because I’ve been doing so much media and traveling so much.”
He acknowledged his role as a participant, saying, “Yeah, I’ve been a terrible first candidate for how much I’ve been slacking on my homework. But yeah, it’s just something that they want me to do every day to track how well the Neuralink is performing over time and to have something to give, I imagine, to the FDA to create all sorts of fancy charts and stuff.”
These Neuralink implants are literally sci-fi coming into real life. What’s interesting is when Neuralink will be able to let people who are blind see again. That will be another game changer.
You can watch the 8.5 hour (8 hours and 37 minutes to be exact) podcast with Musk, the Neuralink team and Fridman below:
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