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.
Can you explain what Neuralink is and what the goal of it is? We put a chip in your brain to control your mind. Yeah, okay.
All right, concerns not alleviated? Yeah, there you go. Jump right in, step right up, who wants one now?
So new, you'll be able to see Neuralink coming from a very long distance because any device that you implanted in a human is. . .
you have to go through so many tests. It moves very slowly. You just do a few people at a time, and then you go to extreme lengths to prove safety.
You have to go through the FDA approvals like we're not trying to sidestep any, you know, regulatory approvals. We're doing everything, you know, by the book and with maximum, really. Actually, we're going far beyond what the requirements are of the FDA from a safety point.
And the initial devices will really just be pretty basic. It'll be about restoring functionality to people who've lost their connection between their brain and their body. So you can imagine, like, if, say, Steven Hawking could talk or communicate as fast as somebody with a fully functioning body, that would be amazing.
So that's like the. . .
what we're trying to do. That's our first application is to restore functionality to quadriplegics and people who have, just for whatever reason, no longer have a connection between, or a limited connection between their brain and their body. And then the second application would be restoration of eyesight.
So if somebody's gone completely blind, maybe even. . .
it's. . .
the optic nerve. . .
you can actually still directly stimulate the neurons in the visual part of the cortex so you can give direct vision to the brain. In fact, depending upon what cameras you use, you could actually see in different wavelengths. Geordi La Forge from like, you know, you could like have that like, I actually watched like an episode of.
. . Star Trek: Next Generation with.
. . special effects compared to what we're used to are like, you know, not that great but he's got like the wraparound glasses and you can see in different wavelengths.
So you can see like ultraviolet, infrared and that kind of thing. So you could actually do that. You could say like you could see in radar if you want.
A way to think about the Neuralink device is like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch with tiny wires or electrodes. Those tiny wires are implanted in the brain and they read and write electrical signals. A lot of people think the brain is just an incredibly mysterious thing.
It is mysterious in a lot of ways, but it does operate with electrical signals. So if you can read and write those electrical signals, you can interface with the brain. And the device is sized so that it is the same size as the piece of skull that is removed.
So it's like a few centimeters diameter of skull that's removed. We replace that with the device after implanting the tiny wires with the surgical robot, and that enables rewrite capability to the neurons completely wirelessly. I could have a Neuralink right now, you wouldn't know, and it charges inductively.
So you could just basically have electromagnetic that you charge the device with. It's like an Apple Watch, exactly. The Neuralink 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.
You won't even notice that someone even has the device. The current input devices are centered around human hands. So it's like we've got these little meat sticks that we move, and this is a certain rate at which you can move your little fingers.
So we've got like the mouse and the keyboard, and with the joystick, Xbox controller or something like that. Since you're no longer trying to use your hands, you don't actually need those conventional control mechanisms. So this is why ultimately I think you'll be able to do conceptual telepathy, like where you can communicate entire concepts to someone else with a Neuralink or to the computer.
So what about upgrades? 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.
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 Neuralink. So we'll take the Neuralink device out and put a new one in.
I think we can help a lot of people with brain injuries. I mean ultimately with an implantable device, you can I think address almost any brain or spine injury. Ultimately the goal of Neuralink is to have a high bandwidth interface in order to mitigate the risk of digital super intelligence.
I don't. . .
I'm not saying it will work to mitigate the risk. It is just. .
. it might help. This is somewhat esoteric, but the limiting factor I think for AI alignment long term is probably going to be the bandwidth.
How quickly can we communicate with our digital tertiary self? We already have a digital sort of third layer above the limbic system and the cortex, which is our phones and our computers and all of our electronics. Devices, uh, but the rate of communication to them is very slow.
The sustained bits per second output of a human is, uh, well below 10 bits per second. So if you think, especially if you say, over a 24-hour period, it's below 5 bits per second. So it's very slow when computers can communicate at trillions of bits per second.
I think this will be important for AI alignment; it is to be able to increase the bandwidth of communication by many orders of magnitude. And along the way, it will solve brain and spinal injuries. And I think ultimately, we - there's potential there to reanimate the body.
So you take the signals from the motor cortex from one Neuralink and then send them to another Neuralink that is just past where the separate spinal cord is, and you - and you essentially shunt the signals from the motor cortex and the both the sensory signals. And so you need to get to the Stato sensory cortex, motor cortex, and you can shut the signals, and you should be able to enable someone to walk again. So I think that will be quite profound, and I'm confident that it is physically possible to do so.
And what's the long long term goal for it? Where does it go? What are the ethical boundaries of it?
The thing I want to emphasize is that it's not going to like sort of pounce on us overnight. It'll, you'll, you'll see it coming. It's going to be very slow.
In fact, I really think that artificial general intelligence or digital super intelligence is likely to arrive before we have really advanced Neural Links. At least that's where the trend is right now. But ultimately, the idea would be to achieve a symbiosis between our biological mind and our kind of digital mind.
So we're already kind of a cyborg if you think of like your phone and your computers as an extension of yourself. In fact, if you leave your phone behind, it's like you have missing limb syndrome; you're like "where did it go? " You know.
So the phone is kind of an extension of ourselves, the computer is various applications that we use are already an extension of us. So we are already a cyborg; it's just that the interface is with our eyes and our fingers, yeah. And that interface, especially output, the rate at which we can type words into a phone or a computer just, it's very slow.
Our input is much better because with the - the data rate from vision is many thousands of times, maybe a million times better than the rate which we can output. So input is like maybe, I don't know, roughly a million times better than output. So, so what a Neuralink device can do is improve that bandwidth; allow you, allow - um, you to be sort of much more symbiotic with you, the AI extension of yourself.
So you can think of like - like a human brain really is could be ugly divided into two parts - one is kind of like the primitive brain, the reptile brain it's sometimes called, you know, it's like got a sort of basic instinct. And then we've got the cortex - the higher level thinking, planning, and that kind of thing; the two operate symbiotically. So I haven't yet met anyone who wants to delete their limbic system or delete their cortex, everyone's quite happy having both; yeah.
They're like "I like it the way it is", you know. But your cortex is way smarter than your limbic system. So but the irony is that even though the cortex is way smarter than the limbic system, most of what it's doing is trying to make the limbic system happy.
It's like limbic system's hungry, hungry, okay, let's get some food, limbic system is horny, okay, let's, you know, have sex or whatever we see that's how to be, so even though you've got a cortex that's way smarter than the limbic system, the cortex is still basically just trying to make limbic system happy. And then if you think of like the computers as a sort of a third layer, the AI as a third layer, it's not necessarily the case that the AI would be acting contrary to our interests. I think if it's closely linked with biological intelligence, I think it could actually be just simply again trying to make the cortex happy, which is trying to make the limbic system happy, so I think we'll put even more computing power to try to get laid, basically.
Now, the AI is going to help you get laid, 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 nerves are damaged, essentially just it's basically a communications bridge. You bridge the communications from the motor cortex past the point in the neck or spine where the nerves are damaged, and you should like, it is physic, it is possible from a physics standpoint to restore full body functionality.
It's a very hard technical problem, but there is nothing that prevents it happening from a physics standpoint. In terms of the next phase of roll out, we, we, we really want to make sure that we make as much progress as possible between each Neuralink patient. So this is, we're only just moving now to our second Neuralink patient, but we hope to have if, if, if things go well - high single digits this year.
And I don't know, maybe this is somewhat dependent on regulatory approval and how much technical progress we make. But within a few years, hopefully thousands. If we have a Bluetooth interface you could just Bluetooth interface to the wheelchair, yeah, and that's probably something we should do pretty soon.
It really matter. Of paperwork, you drive off. A, I think we can limit the speed so it doesn't go careening off into disaster, but so it goes slowly at first.
But yeah, being able to really. The network device just should work generally for anything that's got a Bluetooth interface, including potentially an Optimus. Yeah, you, yes, you could communicate with Optimus.
Yep, absolutely, Optimus will also be able to talk to Optimus. But why not just be. But you could just, yeah, instead of talking, you could just beam it directly.
Or if someone has lost the use of speech, then they can still communicate to an Optimus like they can communicate telepathically to Optimus or by Bluetooth. So even if someone has completely lost the ability to speak, they could still control their computer or phone. An exciting possibility long-term also is to say if you take parts of the Optimus humanoid robot and you combine that with a neural link, let's say somebody has lost their arms or legs, we could actually attach an Optimus arm or Optimus legs and do a neuralink implant.
So that the motor commands from your brain that would go to your biological arms now go to your robot arms or robot legs. And again, you have basically cybernetic superpowers. Yeah, like I said, this is a cyberpunk DX in a future where you have cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your biological and certainly that we'll have as particular as we expand to a large number of customers or patients for Neuralink.
The understanding of the brain will improve dramatically because really there isn't a very fine-grained understanding of the brain today. Because the sensors aren't good enough. You got fMRI which is pretty good but it's still not as good as actually having high bandwidth electrodes in the brain.
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.
Yeah, and could you multitask with it? Yeah, in fact, you look at Nolan's streaming and you can just check out Nolan's streams on the X platform. He's multitasking all the time.
So he's while talking and listening to a podcast. Yeah, exactly. It's really just if you're using your hands and you're playing a video game while talking, there are people that have severe schizophrenia.
They've got basically things that their brain is malfunctioning in some way. And this is actually due to really like physical circuitry issues. You can think of the brain as really, 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. But with a Neuralink device, we can fix those issues. And if someone who think has, 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. Yeah, you can certainly imagine I'm sure people have like parents, grandparents who have memory that's not working as well as it used to be. Sometimes they forget who their grandchildren are or what day it is.
And this is something that a Neuralink device could help fix. The USDA inspector who came by Neuralink facilities literally said in her entire career, she has never seen a better Animal Care Facility. We are the nicest to animals that you could possibly be, even to the rats and mice, even though they did the plague and everything.
It is like a monkey Paradise. The thing that gets completed is that there were some terminal monkeys where, you know, this is long. This is actually several years ago where the monkeys were about to die and we're like, okay, we've got an experimental device.
It's the kind of thing which only could put on a monkey that's about to die. You know, now the monkey died, but it didn't die because of the Neuralink. It died because it was, you know, had a total case of cancer or something like that.
It has never caused the death of a monkey unless they're hiding something from me. Has never caused the death of a monkey. And in fact, we've now had monkeys with the Neuralink implants for 2-3 years and they're doing great.
And we've even replaced the Neuralink twice. It already works, you know, in monkeys and works quite well with monkeys that can play video games just using, just by thinking. I think what it is that concerns people about it, number one being new.
But I think the main thing is the fact that this is something that's like inside your body, right? I think the idea of putting a chip in, the idea of someone putting a chip in my brain, I just have a very viscero. No, I have a very viscera it's an optional thing.
I mean it's we're not going to, you know, would it be though long term? I mean hope so. I think it should be optional.
It would be bizarre if it was not. No, I think it's what the reason I ask is because smartphones right now are sort of optional, but if you don't have a smartphone, the way everything is sort of designed around Society, yes, you cannot have a smartphone, but it's a massive hindrance and a disadvantage in many ways. True, a smartphone is almost essential in a modern society to do things.
Yeah, um so could a Neuralink end up in that same sort. Of place, it's possible. But I'm just saying, if it does, it's many decades from now.
So, it's not like you know, it's not today's problem. Yeah, I'd worry a bit more about digital super intelligence. I'd worry about this.
Try to avoid World War III. Yeah, just make sure we're at least having enough kids to sustain our population. You know, basic stuff like that.
Yeah, 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. That's amazing.
