Tag: Neuralink

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Health

Elon Musk’s Neuralink backed by Google Ventures, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman

Elon Musk's Neuralink backed by Google Ventures, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman

SpaceX Founder and Chief Engineer Elon Musk speaks during the Satellite 2020 Conference in Washington, DC, the United States on March 9, 2020.

Yasin Öztürk | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Elon Musk’s brain-machine interface company Neuralink has raised $ 205 million from investors including Google Ventures, Peter Thiels Founders Fund and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The Series C round, announced in a blog post on Thursday, was led by Dubai-based Vy Capital.

It comes two years after Neuralink raised $ 51 million. The total investment in the company now amounts to $ 363 million, according to the start-up tracker Crunchbase.

Founded in 2016, Neuralink seeks to develop high bandwidth brain implants that can communicate with phones and computers.

The company is targeting quadriplegics with its first devices – who cannot interact with many of today’s devices – and is working on human studies.

“The first clue this device is for is to help quadriplegics regain their digital freedom by allowing users to interact with their computers or phones in high bandwidth and naturally,” it says.

So far, the technology has been tested on pigs and a monkey that could play the video game pong with its mind.

The company said its first product, known as the N1 Link, will be “completely invisible” after implantation and will transmit data over a wireless connection. Musk, who is the CEO of Neuralink as well as Tesla and SpaceX, previously described Neuralink as a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires going into your brain.

“The funds from the round will be used to bring Neuralink’s first product to market and accelerate research and development on future products,” said Neuralink.

Keeping up with AI

Neuralink said Thursday its mission is to “develop brain-machine interfaces that treat various brain disorders, with the ultimate goal of creating an entire brain interface that can more closely connect biological and artificial intelligence.”

AI is only getting smarter, and Musk previously said that Neuralink’s technology could one day allow people to “ride on”.

People are practically already “cyborgs” because they have a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to telephones, computers and applications, he said during a clubhouse discussion in February.

“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” said Musk. “I would say probably at least 1,000 or maybe 10,000 or more.”

The cortex is a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention, perception, thinking, language, and awareness. The digital plane he is referring to can be anything from a person’s iPhone to their Twitter account.

Long-term, Musk claims that Neuralink could enable humans to use telepathy to send concepts to each other and after death to exist in a “stored state” that could then be plugged into a robot or other human. He admitted he was breaking into science fiction territory.

Musk said the Neuralink device will be operational

Neuralink demo

Several other companies are also developing brain-computer interfaces, including Blackrock Neurotech, supported by Thiel and his friend Christian Angermayer.

Elsewhere, scientists from the University of Melbourne have already achieved some success with brain-computer interfaces.

A university study in October showed that two people thought about controlling a computer with a stentrode (a small array of electrodes mounted on a stent) developed by Australian biotech company Synchron, without having to shave and pierce the skull.

The Stentrode brain-computer interface enabled two people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – a rare neurological disorder – to type, text messages, email, online banking, and make online purchases through thoughts.

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World News

Neuralink cofounder Max Hodak leaves Elon Musk’s mind implant firm

Neuralink cofounder Max Hodak leaves Elon Musk's brain implant company

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla, waves as he arrives for a discussion at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington, DC on Monday, March 9, 2020.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Neuralink President Max Hodak announced on Saturday via Twitter that he is no longer with the health tech company he founded together with Elon Musk and has not been for a few weeks. He did not disclose the circumstances of his departure.

Neuralink, headquartered in Fremont, California, is developing “ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect people and computers,” according to the company’s self-description on LinkedIn.

Musk, who is also CEO of electric car maker Tesla and aerospace defense company SpaceX, said without providing evidence that Neuralink’s devices could enable “superhuman perception” and enable paralyzed people to use their smartphones or robotic limbs to operate heads one day and “resolve” autism and schizophrenia.

Neuralink was founded in 2016 and invests tens of millions of his significant personal wealth. Neuralink is also developing surgical robotics to implant its devices. Essentially, tiny wires about a quarter the diameter of a human hair are sewn to connect the implants to the brain.

Skeptics abound.

Musk described the surgery to insert a Neuralink device as less than an hour.

Neuralink demo

Following the August 2020 demo, MIT Technology Review viewed Neuralink in a devastating rendition of the presentation as “neuroscientific theater”.

Musk doesn’t have a background in neuroscience or medical devices, but according to a project leader at Neuralink quoted by the New York Times in 2019, he has “actively sought to solve the technical challenges Neuralink is facing”.

On the medical news site StatNews, a neuroethicist and doctor named Anna Wexler wrote in a comment on April 7, 2021:

“In this new world of private neurotech development, corporate demos are streamed live on YouTube and have a taste of techno-optimism that includes proclamations about a future we haven’t seen yet – but one that we’re sure we will Data is sparse; rhetoric about making the world a better place is difficult. “

The next day, in a series of tweets without providing evidence, Musk wrote:

“With the first @Neuralink product, someone with paralysis can use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone who uses their thumbs

“Later versions will be able to route signals from neural links in the brain to neural links in motor / sensory neuron clusters in the body, enabling paraplegics, for example, to walk again

The device is wirelessly implanted flush with the skull and charged so that you look and feel completely normal. “

On Saturday, Hodak was not immediately available for comment.

For Musk, Saturday was undoubtedly a day when he needed to focus more on his aerospace company, SpaceX. After 167 days in space, astronauts with crew, SpaceX and NASA began their return flight home, with a “splashdown” expected around 2:57 am

One of Hodak’s followers on Twitter asked him what was coming next and he replied, “Not Jurassic Park.” The joke was a reference to an earlier fantastic discussion on the microblogging platform in which Hodak thought, “We could probably build a Jurassic Park if we wanted. Wouldn’t be a genetically authentic dinosaur, but maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering.” Get super exotic novel species. “

Neuralink is one of many medical technology companies working on so-called “brain-machine interfaces”.

Competitors include developers of implants and non-invasive devices such as headsets. These include Kernel, Synchron, Neurable and even Facebook in the USA, CereGate in Germany and Mindmaze in Switzerland.

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Health

Elon Musk’s Neuralink exhibits video of monkey utilizing thoughts to play Pong

Elon Musk’s Neuralink shows video of monkey using mind to play Pong

Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison

Neuralink, the brain-machine interface company founded by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has released a YouTube video of a macaque monkey named Pager playing the Pong video game with his mind.

The 3-minute 27-second video that Musk shared on Twitter late Thursday appears to show the monkey controlling a computer with its brain activity.

“A monkey is literally playing a video game telepathically using a brain chip,” Musk wrote on Twitter.

In the video, a narrator tries to explain how pager pong can be played with his mind.

The nine-year-old monkey, who had two Neuralink devices attached to each side of his brain about six weeks ago, learned how to use a joystick to move a cursor over targets on a screen to get a banana smoothie delivered through a straw says the narrator.

He goes on to explain that the company’s “Link” devices recorded pager neuron activity as he interacted with the computer. It was possible because of the more than 2,000 tiny wires implanted in the regions of his motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements, the narrator said.

This data was then fed into a “decoder algorithm” to predict pager’s intended hand movements in real time.

After the decoder was calibrated, Neuralink said the monkey could use it to move the cursor where it wanted it instead of relying on the joystick.

In fact, the YouTube video shows pager controlling a paddle in the arcade game Pong while the joystick is unplugged.

Pigs to monkeys

In August, Neuralink ran a live demo of its technology on three pigs. An audience was shown real-time neural signals from one of the pigs Musk named Gertrude.

Ultimately, Neuralink, headquartered in San Francisco, wants to increase the speed at which information can flow from the human brain to a machine.

While the technology is still in its infancy, Neuralink hopes their devices will soon enable paralyzed people to operate machines with their minds.

On Thursday, Musk said the first Neuralink product would enable a paralyzed person to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using their thumbs.

The AI ​​is only getting smarter, and Neuralink’s technology could one day allow people to “ride along,” Musk said in a January interview at the clubhouse.

To illustrate the pace of advancement in AI, the innovator – who believes machine intelligence will ultimately outperform human intelligence – pointed to breakthroughs in research laboratories like OpenAI, which he co-founded, and DeepMind, a London AI laboratory, which was acquired by Google in 2014. DeepMind “basically has no more games to win,” said Musk, who was an early investor in the company.

According to Musk, people are already “cyborgs” because they have a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to phones, computers and applications.

“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” he said. “I would probably say at least 1,000 or maybe 10,000 or more.”

The digital plane he is referring to can be anything from a person’s iPhone to their Twitter account.

Long-term, Musk claims that Neuralink could enable humans to send concepts to one another using telepathy and after death to exist in a “saved state” that could then be put into a robot or another human. He admitted that he was into science fiction.