25 ms·

Neuralink Progress Update [video]

281 points by lelf 6y ago

jka 6y ago
This could be the contemporary equivalent of the lie detector test -- unlikely to be proven wrong for a long time, yet influential despite of questionable results.
mepian 6y ago
Neuralink is a very interesting effort, but with brain-computer interfaces there is an elephant in the room that seems to be brushed off or overlooked all the time: the security of computers that get connected to your brain. You don't want something so vital to be vulnerable to buffer overflows and speculative execution attacks. I wonder if this is ever going to be addressed seriously.
- Artistry121 6y ago
  They did. Very limited attack surface.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    Limited attack surface is not acceptable for a device inside your brain.
    - nickik 6y ago
      And nobody ever said that its the only thing they do.
      - ianmobbs 6y ago
        Okay, but it is Neuralink’s responsibility to say everything they do. If the only thing OP can find is that they guarantee a “limited attack surface”, that’s frankly not acceptable for a device in your brain.
        jfoster 6y ago
        > it is Neuralink’s responsibility to say everything they do When they bring a product to market, that is.
        nickik 6y ago
        The presentation was in general about Neuralink. You had 1 question about security and the guy gave an 30s answer saying it is very important, they are doing it from ground up and try to bake in security from the beginning. He mentioned one example, of seperating BLE stack on a hardware level. Seems like a reasonable answer for a Q&A of this format. Neuralink has actually no responsibility to tell you their whole security architecture. They are presenting this for recruiting and showing the public some of their progress.
- o_p 6y ago
  The only reason why software is unsecure is because we decided to tradeoff security for development speed. Using secure languages, formal software verification,etc you could create secure systems. Brain software would definitely have to be put in much higher standard.
  - tines 6y ago
    Making it secure will take more time, and companies will not willingly waste time because it puts them behind competitors. Therefore security is a solution that can only be enforced via government regulation, and of course not all governments are going to regulate it, which will naturally lead to a race to deregulate under pain of being left behind. So we might be able to make it secure hypothetically, but my bets are, we will choose not to. Case in point would be self-driving cars, which are hilariously underregulated.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      > Case in point would be self-driving cars, which are hilariously underregulated. Why is it bad? Self-driving cars kill less people than human-driver cars per mile. If we heavily regulate self-driving cars, we will slow down self-driving cars development. Cars will probably be safer, but the number of cars will be smaller, thus number of deaths will be higher. No, we don't need self-driving cars regularions at this moment.
      - tines 6y ago
        > Why is it bad? I didn't say it was bad, I was just observing and predicting. > Self-driving cars kill less people than human-driver cars per mile. The types of self driving cars you are referring to are the kind being sold to consumers now, which are more like "assisted driving" than self driving. There are very few of them (i.e. they are not widely tested), they are owned by rich people (selection bias), and they ship with a giant warning not to let the car actually drive itself without supervision. So you're really testing the crash rate of wealthy educated people with driving assistance against the rest of humanity without assistance, it is no wonder the deaths are lower. The type I am referring to are the ones that actually drive themselves, the shipping trucks and whatnot. > If we heavily regulate self-driving cars, we will slow down self-driving cars development. Cars will probably be safer, but the number of cars will be smaller, thus number of deaths will be higher. This simply restates the point I made originally: we will be able to make them safe, but we will choose not to for whatever reason.
- asdff 6y ago
  Who is to say that attacks might come from outside? Nations might mandate a backdoor from the Neuralink developers directly. Malevolent ones will surely want a literal kill switch feature, or copy the technology with their own. Imagine the horrifying power of a nation state that can kill any citizen at any time in any place with a keystroke. With that everpresent threat, you might not even need to be served propaganda to fall in line with the whims of the government.
  - LukeB42 6y ago
    <Aramaki> What do you mean I bricked my device?
tryauuum 6y ago
It must be fun to work in a team of those assorted specialists
- RivieraKid 6y ago
  Not really: https://outline.com/FnfbkD https://outline.com/FnfbkD "The company is now down to just two of its eight original founding scientists."
dmerrick 6y ago
I enjoyed this joke from the stream: > If you bombard earth with photons long enough, it will emit a Tesla
- mlb_hn 6y ago
  I think that goes back to a Karpathy quote [1], don't know where he got it from [1] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/961307010246492160 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/961307010246492160
  - fotta 6y ago
    They mentioned it was a joke they had heard (presumably this tweet).
  - karpathy 6y ago
    Yes it’s one of my favorite thoughts, which is why I pinned it :)
    - modeless 6y ago
      It's a good one! You helping out with the ML at Neuralink at all? Maybe someday Autopilot could learn something from recordings of people's brains while driving :)
- colordrops 6y ago
  Whats the name of the employee sitting next to Elon who said it?
  - ofou 6y ago
    Max Hodak (https://twitter.com/max_hodak https://twitter.com/max_hodak)
    - colordrops 6y ago
      Oh, didn't realize he was a founder.
aaron695 6y ago
The fact Elon talks about the universe stared as leptons and not hydrogen as many pop sci shows do is a good example of his whole game plan. Understand things at their lowest level and build. Disrupt at the lowest level you can.
- typon 6y ago
  Why pick leptons? Why not quarks? It's arbitrary.
  - qntmfred 6y ago
    Elon did say quarks and leptons.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    Did you say this because you really hate Elon or are really into the Universes first few second :) (Elon got it right)
0wis 6y ago
Once again a project that seems to have gone from the drawing table to redesign the prototype. And now well under way ! What I'm the most curious about is how they plan to handle exceptions and failure modes to keep it unharmful.
anorphirith 6y ago
they mentioned you can "record backup and replay memories" and potentially transfer them into a new body
- tryauuum 6y ago
  and they mentioned it is gonna be in the future (some completely undefined amount of time lately, so technically it is not a lie)
- gruez 6y ago
  >transfer More like, copy to the new body and kill the old one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox
- handol 6y ago
  Neuralink v1.0 has all the hardware for self-driving.
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
If human brains merge with computers, I hope we are running free software in our heads. The idea of code you cannot observe or control, in your head, seems like an attack on humanity. I'd like to see this put into actual law from the start, possibly at the level of a UN Human Rights declaration. I'm not interested in living in a world with an app store for your brain. As an aside, the technical capability for true mind-reading doesn't seem too far fetched anymore. I don't think society is currently structured to accept the consequences of that. People are not what they appear to be on the outside.
- benmller313 6y ago
  If you don't want proprietary software in your head, don't install it in your head. Why do you need the UN to stop you from doing that to yourself?
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    It's naive to think this will be optional for long once it's viable. Oh you have X,Y,Z mental illness? Treatment from or inclusion in society is contingent upon getting this chip installed.
    - zipwitch 6y ago
      Want this job? Even if it doesn't get to the level of "all employees need to be running OurCorp Headware (tm)", being required to be running Microsoft Headwindows in order to get a job with medical benefits seems ominously plausible.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Want to use the neuraIM to talk with family and friends? I know you'd prefer a FLOSS nIRC client, but everyone you know is already on WhatsBrain.
    - justinclift 6y ago
      Let alone forcibly installing such a chip as "for the persons own good". Or more likely "to stop terrorists" due to needing an excuse. That's almost definitely going to happen. If the tech were available today we'd probably be hearing disturbing leaks of forced chip installation in people heads in various countries already. :(
blackbear_ 6y ago
"This is starting to sound like a black mirror episode... Well, I guess they're just very good at predicting" - Elon Musk
Tuxer 6y ago
I'm surprised nobody talked about the potential implications of effectively embedding, now that the device is standalone, a lithium ion battery into your skull. I'm not a battery hater whatsoever but in the case of a thermal runoff if the battery starts burning... there is no way to get it out.
- BillinghamJ 6y ago
  I wondered about this, but is it not already the case with other existing devices like pacemakers etc?
  - nmstoker 6y ago
    Yes, and that's why there are such high standards for medical devices. In the presentation Elon specifically mentions their involvement with the FDA and highlighted their focus on safety (drawing a parallel with Tesla five star ratings)
- polytely 6y ago
  Seems like a nightmare now that I think about it, like you get a ransomware popup beamed into your visual cortex saying: "We are in your brain, wire the contents of your bank account to the following bitcoin adres: <adress>. If you do not comply, we will blow up your neuralink, if you try to alert anyone, we will blow up your neuralink. We are watching, you have 2 hours, good luck." "01:59:59" "01:59:58" ...
  - zipwitch 6y ago
    "it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the ... middle all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who's somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself." -Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age
  - 6y ago
jv22222 6y ago
This makes me feel uneasy, and weird, but... I think I like it. It's probably all those movies written about the subject (ie Matrix) that add to the uneasiness. I like how he focuses on safety aspects and that it's reversible etc.
zuhayeer 6y ago
Not only are you going to have to charge your phone, watch, headphones, and glasses, but you're gonna have to remember to charge your brain now too
- codeisawesome 6y ago
  Well, un-dismissible pop up screens that can even wake you from sleep might help... until it’s used for more than battery charge notifications
- nmstoker 6y ago
  Although presumably, given the device is plugged directly into your brain, they can make it remind you of this in friendly way.
- balfirevic 6y ago
  > but you're gonna have to remember to charge your brain now too Well, try not sleeping for a few days :)
  - zuhayeer 6y ago
    touché
- neillyons 6y ago
  "Can I borrow your charger my brain is dead" lol
- tintor 6y ago
  The wireless charger could be installed in the bed itself, or in the headrest of your car seat.
  - est31 6y ago
    Can't wait for the daily rush on the cranial induction seats on commuter trains.
ethanwillis 6y ago
This absolutely should not be allowed to be done. We are treading on dangerous territory, except everyone is excitedly plodding forward without a second thought.
- mysterEFrank 6y ago
  I agree. This work is incredibly cool scientifically but this seems too dangerous to pursue further
  - drannex 6y ago
    - Said everyone who saw the first computers, planes, automobiles, trains, bikes, phones, telegram, and likely the wheel.
    - mysterEFrank 6y ago
      I'm sure everybody who saw the first nuclear bomb said this too, and they were right. I am become death
      - aero-glide 6y ago
        One could argue nuclear bombs and MAD are the reason there hasn't been a third world war. Someone asked an engineer who designed ICBMs : How do you feel that things you worked on may never actually be used? He said, then I have succeeded. The purpose has always been to act as an deterrent. If my work was used, then somewhere something has failed. Off topic to neuralink, but found it interesting.
- neckardt 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on why this is dangerous and shouldn't be done?
- emteycz 6y ago
  This was already being done way before Musk, for medical reasons. You can't expect people to put society in front of their own health.
ofou 6y ago
Sometimes I think that we are going to become the AI that Elon Musk is trying to prepare us to fight against to. This technology is literally opening pandora's box. Both the amazing and scariest thing in the world will come out. Pretty crazy times we are living. Cannot highlight this enough, we're summoning the demon hacking our brains.
- colordrops 6y ago
  If AI becomes vastly more intelligent than humans as he predicts, a neural implant is nothing more than a teddy bear to make us feel better. If we augment ourselves with AI, our expanded selves will see the brain as vestigial and slowing us down, eventually excising it, then we become full machines. In a way, transitioning like this, rather than only creating non-human AI in parallel, would hopefully transfer some of our humanity into the machines. In any case we would look back at this transition as a natural metamorphosis. I wouldn't be surprised if this metamorphosis is a natural emergent phenomenon among civilizations across the universe.
  - ofou 6y ago
    My point is that Human + AI = AI. There's no AI around the corner as far as we know, but you can argue that the portion of machine intelligence is growing at a crazy rate. So, we're becoming slowly an AI as you correctly pointed out, maybe it's just plain evolution. I wonder if no AI comes out after all (by itself), we'll be the One created through ourselves.
    - metroholografix 6y ago
      The AI is already here. It's called technocapitalism. We're not becoming an AI, we're being controlled and modified by one, so as to better fit its teleology.
      - nickik 6y ago
        Is anybody else sick about literally everything people don't like being <xy>capitalism?
m0dE 6y ago
The only major technical update from its initial announcement a year ago is that they're no longer hiding the transmitter behind the participant's ear. (and pigs!) Other than that, the whole thing seemed like a recruitment attempt, but that's fine. I fully support mission, and I'd love to work for them if given opportunity. To apply: https://jobs.lever.co/neuralink https://jobs.lever.co/neuralink
- spullara 6y ago
  Since they started the presentation announcing it was a recruitment event, I think you are right.
- mysterEFrank 6y ago
  They put it in a pig brain and can use neural signals to predict the pigs behavior - that's major progress
  - zaroth 6y ago
    Seriously! How much faster would people expect them to be able to run with this? Something like this is the work of a lifetime. Elon is 49, and isn’t running out of funding any time soon. It’s an incredibly costly and risky endeavor which could improve a lot of lives. I think the idea of putting it into an otherwise healthy individual is way, way off and kind of a distraction? But in the meantime if this can somehow help treat e.g. Alzheimer’s it would be an absolute godsend for millions of people.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Not behavior, motor signals. Major difference, but still, a nice achievement.
kevinskii 6y ago
I'd be happy to be corrected by an actual neuroscientist, but I don't think some folks realize just how far away the Neuralink team is from being able to do any of the things they are claiming. Inserting electrodes in the brain is the easy part. The reason no one else has yet bothered with this level of miniaturization is because it won't be of much benefit until you can figure out a way to decode the signals reliably. This is extremely daunting, and it's something that has occupied lots of brilliant people full time for decades.
- nikkwong 6y ago
  I actually really hope that is the case. I have a feeling of existential dread every time I imagine all the effort I am putting into learning and acquiring new skills all going to waste when those tasks become absolutely second nature to everyone, irrespective of effort or time investment. Although, I am all for fixing the existing problems that it obviously could solve; I fear my mother will succumb to Alzheimer's, and something like this is dearly needed. It just seems like we won't know when to pull the brakes.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > I actually really hope that is the case. I have a feeling of existential dread every time I imagine all the effort I am putting into learning and acquiring new skills all going to waste when those tasks become absolutely second nature to everyone, irrespective of effort or time investment. I'm not a neuroscientist, but with such a limited understanding of the brain, beyond just the anatomy and the nature of neurotransmitters, let alone consciousness, I think you can allay such fears for the time being. I think this could have significant benefits for neural diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, ALS and possibly anxiety and addiction/mania based maladies but the idea of simply being able to 'download' the ability to learn a new skill in real time seems entirely preposterous. I say that because some of the skills that I have been able to turn into careers have actually required I learn something where my brain no longer interferes with the process so that it is done effectively. The notion of muscle memory is real, meaning you cease thinking about it and it just occurs out without any effort due to continual practice and repetition: my question is how can your body recover from an unexpected/unpredictable error if you haven't already practiced that same scenario over and over, and you were only given the default normal operation of x skill? Most learning is adaptable and gained from observed behavior, be it our own or others, to mistakes. Experience is a funny thing, and our brains are flawed in recalling many of our most cherished or dreaded events and experiences accurately; I honestly think this could be a medical boon for the aforementioned diseases, but the Matrix-like learning will probably be a quixotic pursuit, in my opinion. One that sounds awesome on paper but would be horrible in practice.
Udik 6y ago
I haven't watched the whole thing, did they address the problem of writing? All I saw was detecting firing neurons from a small region of the brain (which is cool and useful in itself) but saw nothing about actually transmitting to the brain signals that the brain can interpret correctly. Which seems by far the hardest part, when the device stops being a pure observer of a tiny region of the brain.
- zizee 6y ago
  I believe that they did show the "threads" firing, and the neurons lighting up in response. I imagine that initially they will be focusing on blunter interventions into the brain, like detecting impending epileptic attacks, and send some sort of signal to try and interrupt it. I think such things already exist in a cruder form. It's going to be a long while, and a lot of iterations before you can expect to just "know" the contents of your latest text message.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kerbal2000 6y ago
Nobody asked the single hard question, so I'll put it here: Those types of electrodes are known to cause permanent brain tissue scaring after 1-3 years, similar to asbestos scaring. How do they intend to solve this problem?
- lightgreen 6y ago
  If I'm quadriplegic, I'd prefer my brain tissues scarred after 1-3 years and then new implant installed in a different spot rather than being a vegetable during that time. (And when we have these implants helping paralized people for 10 years, we will think of something. We don't need to solve all problems at once.)
- vwat 6y ago
  Actually every comment section out there is riddled with this question and it is directly addressed in the video. Perhaps you should watch it...
dwighttk 6y ago
Oof. I wish YouTube had more than 2x playback rate. Elon is hard to listen to at less.
- Veedrac 6y ago
  document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].playbackRate = 3
  - dwighttk 6y ago
    thanks!
sebmanchester 6y ago
Is there some type of calibration that would be needed after implant to allow for variance? Or does the robot surgeon just have perfect accuracy in where the threads are implanted?
- eigenvalue 6y ago
  I don’t think it matters so much to be super precise on the positioning. The spike detection is pretty robust and then the real heavy lifting is in analyzing the patterns of spikes across the set of 1,000+ locations. And that is automatically calibrated as part of the process of getting it to work at all (that is, getting the predictions to match the reality).
cruzai 6y ago
Unimpressed, but great work..I can see potential but this is like making a plane for landing on moon we are one decade early on this technology ...Electrode impedance is a big deal that I didn't see addressed here...It hasn't been addressed for the past decade...There are so many impressive work I see like the work by Berkeley professor Jose M. Carmena that could address this issue...next Decade can be exciting.
- sidcool 6y ago
  Elon was pretty clear since beginning that it is nowhere near complete and the demo is to attract talent
- elcritch 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on which aspects of the electrode impedance?
rantwasp 6y ago
I think there are a lot of questions one might ask but I’m going to say that it’s too early to ask most of them. I’m sure that once this makes it past prototype stage and human trials are on the horizon they will need to have good questions to a lot of these questions and I have no doubt they are thinking about basic and not so basic scenarios. This is a good PR/recruiting stunt but nothing more. (Also Musk could use a little bit of training when it comes to the way he is speaking and is timing his speech)
- quenix 6y ago
  Musk's presentation style has been this way since forever — after watching a couple of his presentations, you kind of get used to it. He's not much of a showman.
mrwnmonm 6y ago
A comment from techcrunch: As the scientist who first published data on neuronal firing in the brain of freely-behaving primates (available at: Ludvig N. et al., 2001, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 900, pages 179-187) , I am curious to see this demonstration. I also know that in order to make any meaningful link between a human mind and a computer one must record the identified firing of at least 5 billion neurons from the "mind-generating" association cortex in behavioral and environmental contexts -- which is absolutely impossible with each and every currently available and envisioned electrophysiological technique loved or not, claimed or not, advertised or not by Musk. --- Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD Source: https://tcrn.ch/3b3YGGC https://tcrn.ch/3b3YGGC
- kevinskii 6y ago
  Thank you for joining the discussion. What do you think about the counterargument that they don't need to create a full mind-body interface, that they could offer a lot of benefit just by doing simpler things like predicting limb movements?
  - mrwnmonm 6y ago
    It is not my comment, I just found it interesting. Sorry for the confusion.
- sneak 6y ago
  He and his teams seem to have been quite successful with other businesses and ideas that were within the limits of known technology: electric cars and orbital rockets and LEO communications satellites. All of these things existed before (and all credit to the mountains of hard work of SpaceX and Tesla for polishing and improving them as much as they have). Perhaps he’s not pushing the envelope enough if they haven’t attempted the actually impossible yet. I’ll be cheering for them in any case; the impossible has a pesky habit of becoming possible in the decades that building some of this stuff takes. There is no shame in trying to do the impossible and failing; proving the current impossibility of hard things has value.
  - 6y ago
throwawayneural 6y ago
(throwaway.) I've been deeply interested in this field for a long time and BCIs specifically. (not to brag, just to explain:) I have a graduate degree in a related neuro field and strong & fast coding abilities. Working @ Neuralink interests me a lot. But I've also read the stories about Musk, how he treats employees, the working conditions, etc. [0] I'm not afraid of hard work but can folks here shed light whether it might be worth it (or not) to go work there? Are Tesla, SpaceX, etc. engineers generally... happy/satisfied? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18679715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18679715
- kiba 6y ago
  You're assuming that Elon Musk personally run each company he found as if it's his full time job. There's only one Musk.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Specifically Neurolink is likely only about 5% of the time. Its about half each for Tesla and SpaceX according to him, more or less depending on what happening.
- holler 6y ago
  > Are Tesla, SpaceX, etc. engineers generally... happy/satisfied? I don't work at either but I have watched plenty of SpaceX product, err, rocket launches, and they seem to frequently live-stream from their Hawthorn CA headquarters with lots of gleeful & cheering employees. My impression is that at least for SpaceX, it's probably both highly demanding and highly rewarding. In another life I'd love to work at a company like that!
- deegles 6y ago
  There are plenty of jobs with poor working conditions where you don't get to build rockets, cars or BCIs. Not that it makes it ok, but it appears plenty of people are consciously making that tradeoff.
moneywoes 6y ago
How much would this technology cost?
- suyash 6y ago
  They said goal is to make it as affordable as LASIK
ofou 6y ago
My thoughts on @neuralink The Good: Explore by direct observation/interaction the brain, cure countless disseases along the way, and eventually augment humans. The Bad: Privacy, Hacking, identity theft, memory implants, infinite dystopias. The Ugly: The rich/poor divide will be cognitive.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  There were thousands of similar predictions when mobile phones were created. Literally, when any new technology created, people started predicting dooms.
  - ofou 6y ago
    Yes, business as usual but what is actually unpredictable are second or even third order effects from the deployment of technologies. Taking social networks as example, USA's president sounds like doom to me.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      Before social networks TV influenced president elections, radio before that, and newspapers before radio. Each time media changes, it is doom.
      - ofou 6y ago
        It is curious to see that the rate of change is the sole thing that accelerates between medias across time. Let's imagine a 1000000x speed scenario among virtually all human endevours. Maybe not doom but that's all folks. By the way, I'm optimistic about the future.
      - asdff 6y ago
        This is a little bit of a false equivalency imo. You can walk away from a TV. This is literally inside your brain. Imagine if a bad actor got the reigns, or if a nation had a back door installed for their version for direct access to their citizens. Literal mind control that you can't escape from at all. No one is at the TV for 24 hours a day. Imagine if a kill switch were possible, ushering the era of death by keystroke hundreds of miles away. You can't kill someone with a TV, or a radio, or a newspaper.
torotonnato 6y ago
The efforts made by Neuralink’s team are impressive and, IMO, the idea is very serious, with lots of practical short term consequences as well. Someone said that getting electrodes into the brain is the easiest part, but I beg to differ on this, for the simple reason that data is more accessible, abundant and clean than ever. Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data. Now, on the demo and its tech: some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? The stacks I used in my embedded projects were simply horrible and I’m heavily biased against BT even on principle :D What about the electrodes being, in the end, simple conductors and, so, antennas? I’d hate to be in a NMR machine with a NL in my head (thunderstorms too? An attacker with a jammer?!). I was expecting a write demo too, but maybe it’s not something you want to be streamed online for the general public. Last thought: the pig limbs prediction task. I think that the prediction was greatly aided by the chosen setting of the experiment (tapis roulant), but still impressive. I’m sure that today we saw a very important piece of human history unfold before out very own eyes
- modeless 6y ago
  They talked about security and explicitly mentioned that the Bluetooth radio is hardware isolated in some way. They mentioned using encryption without detail but I expect that the radios are treated as untrusted. Also they are using third party penetration testing.
- visarga 6y ago
  > some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? Being Bluetooth, you probably have to retry a few times to get it to connect and will fail frequently from WiFi interference. Also, the BT software stack is a mess. For example I have problems connecting AirPods to MacBooks (recent ones), same company on both sides, still not working reliably. BT is a shit technology if there ever was one.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data. That is only true if the data is likely to be the right data. For motor control, electrical signals seem to be pretty much it. But we have no clear proof that the same is true for higher thought processes - it could well be that chemical signals and processing inside each neuron itself are major components of that, so the data would be massively limited. It would also be interesting to see how well such an approach would do when tried on a microprocessor - could we tell that a microprocessor is displaying "hello world" by sampling electrical signals from its transistors and trying to apply some kind of machine learning on that data?
jhales 6y ago
How do they decide where to place the electrodes? And how do they keep them fixed in the right position?
- tintor 6y ago
  - They focus on avoiding blood vessels. It is up to the software to learn the mapping, after implantation. - They talked about flexibility, slack of electrodes, and pig head-butting. :)
xwdv 6y ago
I would love to be able to control vim entirely through Neuralink. Using vim already feels like I’m coding at the speed of thought, this would literally be the speed of thought. The era of the 100x developer is coming.
throwaw4y-plate 6y ago
Was there any mention of glial scarring anywhere?
visarga 6y ago
Can't wait to have neural data associated to text and images for multi-modal training of neural nets. Up to present we have had the basic modalities: video, image, audio and text, now we can have a new modality which is more direct than even speech, remains to see how much of the embedding space it can cover.
panjo 6y ago
I'm so excited by this and I'm glad that someone like Elon is finally concentrating on agri-tech. This is great news for pig farmers. Imagine being able to control the amount of exercise they take, to bring them inside automatically and send them back out on a schedule. If they get rustled or lost somehow they could be ordered to walk back to the farm. I'm sure this will revolutionize farming.
elliottbavarian 6y ago
What is technological progress without the courage to try. To challenge what is impossible by all modern reason.
benjohnson1707 6y ago
The big difference between him and top notch medical experts seems to be this : piles of cash and cutting edge tech across all disciplines thrown at a problem. It's not common that a research proposal gets granted hundreds of millions of funding. But here is what I've learned from Tesla/SpaceX: Cutting-edge tech changes the initial conditions of a problem. How things are measured, analyzed, manufactured, simulated etc. The only things that are fundamentally constraining are the laws of nature. As long as you don't violate them, things can be done, potentially (in principle). That why Musk has been like: OK, I see a feasible trajectory, so let's throw money and talent at the problem and see how it goes. Which by the way is how progress works. Pushing things. Experts (especially scientists) have acquired their expertise within certain initial conditions. Initial conditions incorporate assumptions that might be outdated after having thrown money and tech at the issue. That's why Musk doesn't give a damn about conventional wisdom but in my opinion only cares about the fundamental physics when it comes to basic feasibility. What seems to be different compared to a lot of others seems to be that he is a scientific mind by training and a hardcore engineer by profession. Plus basic economics literacy and tons of money. You usually find only one or those traits in people. Tldr : his mantra is 'question your constraints'... Let's see how well that goes with this project
hcineb 6y ago
Neuroscientist here. I have personally implanted many animals of different species with similar apparatus as the ones described by neuralink, and published numerous papers in the field, including theoretical papers on neural activity coding and modeling. Here are my two cents about this. Sorry if it’s long, I m hoping that this will help provide perspective on the topic at hand. As a scientist, the first thing that is striking is that this is another example of science by press conference. It’s probably why there is a lot of eye rolling in the field. No data has been released (including in the single author elon musk paper published a couple of years ago), and it is therefore impossible to judge the results independently, let alone have a scientific discussion about it. First off, it should be noted that not much here is completely new. Chronic implantation of multielectrode arrays, with wireless recordings have been around for roughly 15 years. These arrays are able to record and stimulate. This is usually done in mice, in which space is even more limited than the pig. The number of contacts (i.e recording points) of 1000 is also on par with the current state of the art (see, e.g the neuropixel implants). The fact that neuralink managed to reproduce this seemingly from scratch is an impressive feat, but in no way is it novel. Dozens of labs around the world do this every day. The issues with electrode recordings are to get close enough to each cell without damanging anything. If the contact is too far, the recording is polluted by other neurons, and one has to rely on blind signal separation to make out each cell. As a result in typical experiments, each electrode is manually positioned In the close vicinity of the neuron (think micrometers). This is a challenge with large arrays because each contact is not independant which reduces the yield. This likely happens here. Another important problem arises with chronic implantantion. When you insert something in the brain, make it as thin as you wish the brain will not like it. There is going to be pushing and shoving of cells, and when the brain reset in position (within minutes) it will have moved. This requires fine tuning of each electrode’s position to keep it close to the neurons. More importantly, it will create a scar. Cells will die around it, the organism will try and isolate the foreign object. This takes weeks. This is the reason why, roughly speaking, no single cell has been recorded from for more than weeks (the record i believe is around 3 months): after a while the electrode is simply too isolated from the actual neurons to pick up a signal. There are endeavors around this, With other electrode materials, etc but neuralink does not do that. (Another really cool way to do chronic implant is with calcium imaging with small implanted confocal microscopes) In addition, this is likely bad for the organism, and possibly not something you would want happen in your brain. BTW I believe that (in addition to size constraints) this is why they are doing studies on pigs now (although their neural activity is not well documented as opposed to mice/rats or primates): it is commonly used as a model for human injuries. Finally, do be aware that some humans are already implanted chronically in the brain with electrodes: - For parkinsons, in a specific, non cortical area. These electrodes can record and stimulate to alleviate crises - For hearing, it’s not stricto sensu in the brain (in the cochlear cavities) but it stimulates neurons - On the surface of the brain, with ecog electrodes mostly used during surgery but sometimes chronically for epilepsy diagnosis In addition to these technical issues (which are serious enough, by the way), the claims made here are just sort of outlandish. Even in very well controlled laboratory conditions, there is very little evidence that it is remotely possible to “record” memories (let alone replay them). For the most part it is because we have _strictly no idea_ how _anything is encoded_ in the brain (there is even raging debate as to whether it “encodes” anything). (Sorry to my neuroscientist friends and colleagues, but we are not close to anything the layperson would qualify as “understanding what the brain does”, by a long stretch.) In addition, some of the less outlandish claims (e.g. controlling robotic limbs, etc) made by neuralink are things on which neuroscientists have been working on for decades. It’s not impossible for sure (as many of us argue in their grant proposals), but it is hard. And the plan presented by neuralink (more electrodes) is in no way innovative to an insider in the field. In fact, I doubt that it would get NIH funding. TLDR there are many well documented issues with this endeavor that many people have been working on for decades. It’s frustrating that the general public be exposed to the uninteresting sugar coated sci fi version of an otherwise complex, nuanced and thus interesting field of science.
andai 6y ago
I have to wonder if the electrodes and implants are really necessary? Mary Lou Jepsen is working on reading and writing activity to individual neurons using infrared holography -- a wearable device.
- emteycz 6y ago
  If someone else is interested, I found this recent video on the topic:https://youtu.be/CqsglRFjEKI https://youtu.be/CqsglRFjEKI
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> What Dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the Neuralink, remove it, and be healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig. If I understand correctly, this is a device that can turn a person into a pig?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Nah, that's the web browser, invented a while ago.
ytninja 6y ago
where can I find the source code for neuralink in GitHub?
ytninja 6y ago
which should I learn now assembly or c for neuralink programming? or I don't need to learn anything after surgery I can install all directly to my brain?

281 points by lelf 6y ago

jka 6y ago

This could be the contemporary equivalent of the lie detector test -- unlikely to be proven wrong for a long time, yet influential despite of questionable results.

mepian 6y ago

Neuralink is a very interesting effort, but with brain-computer interfaces there is an elephant in the room that seems to be brushed off or overlooked all the time: the security of computers that get connected to your brain. You don't want something so vital to be vulnerable to buffer overflows and speculative execution attacks. I wonder if this is ever going to be addressed seriously.

Artistry121 6y ago
They did. Very limited attack surface.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  Limited attack surface is not acceptable for a device inside your brain.
  - nickik 6y ago
    And nobody ever said that its the only thing they do.
    - ianmobbs 6y ago
      Okay, but it is Neuralink’s responsibility to say everything they do. If the only thing OP can find is that they guarantee a “limited attack surface”, that’s frankly not acceptable for a device in your brain.
      - jfoster 6y ago
        > it is Neuralink’s responsibility to say everything they do When they bring a product to market, that is.
      - nickik 6y ago
        The presentation was in general about Neuralink. You had 1 question about security and the guy gave an 30s answer saying it is very important, they are doing it from ground up and try to bake in security from the beginning. He mentioned one example, of seperating BLE stack on a hardware level. Seems like a reasonable answer for a Q&A of this format. Neuralink has actually no responsibility to tell you their whole security architecture. They are presenting this for recruiting and showing the public some of their progress.
o_p 6y ago
The only reason why software is unsecure is because we decided to tradeoff security for development speed. Using secure languages, formal software verification,etc you could create secure systems. Brain software would definitely have to be put in much higher standard.
- tines 6y ago
  Making it secure will take more time, and companies will not willingly waste time because it puts them behind competitors. Therefore security is a solution that can only be enforced via government regulation, and of course not all governments are going to regulate it, which will naturally lead to a race to deregulate under pain of being left behind. So we might be able to make it secure hypothetically, but my bets are, we will choose not to. Case in point would be self-driving cars, which are hilariously underregulated.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    > Case in point would be self-driving cars, which are hilariously underregulated. Why is it bad? Self-driving cars kill less people than human-driver cars per mile. If we heavily regulate self-driving cars, we will slow down self-driving cars development. Cars will probably be safer, but the number of cars will be smaller, thus number of deaths will be higher. No, we don't need self-driving cars regularions at this moment.
    - tines 6y ago
      > Why is it bad? I didn't say it was bad, I was just observing and predicting. > Self-driving cars kill less people than human-driver cars per mile. The types of self driving cars you are referring to are the kind being sold to consumers now, which are more like "assisted driving" than self driving. There are very few of them (i.e. they are not widely tested), they are owned by rich people (selection bias), and they ship with a giant warning not to let the car actually drive itself without supervision. So you're really testing the crash rate of wealthy educated people with driving assistance against the rest of humanity without assistance, it is no wonder the deaths are lower. The type I am referring to are the ones that actually drive themselves, the shipping trucks and whatnot. > If we heavily regulate self-driving cars, we will slow down self-driving cars development. Cars will probably be safer, but the number of cars will be smaller, thus number of deaths will be higher. This simply restates the point I made originally: we will be able to make them safe, but we will choose not to for whatever reason.
asdff 6y ago
Who is to say that attacks might come from outside? Nations might mandate a backdoor from the Neuralink developers directly. Malevolent ones will surely want a literal kill switch feature, or copy the technology with their own. Imagine the horrifying power of a nation state that can kill any citizen at any time in any place with a keystroke. With that everpresent threat, you might not even need to be served propaganda to fall in line with the whims of the government.
- LukeB42 6y ago
  <Aramaki> What do you mean I bricked my device?

tryauuum 6y ago

It must be fun to work in a team of those assorted specialists

RivieraKid 6y ago
Not really: https://outline.com/FnfbkD https://outline.com/FnfbkD "The company is now down to just two of its eight original founding scientists."

dmerrick 6y ago

I enjoyed this joke from the stream: > If you bombard earth with photons long enough, it will emit a Tesla

mlb_hn 6y ago
I think that goes back to a Karpathy quote [1], don't know where he got it from [1] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/961307010246492160 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/961307010246492160
- fotta 6y ago
  They mentioned it was a joke they had heard (presumably this tweet).
- karpathy 6y ago
  Yes it’s one of my favorite thoughts, which is why I pinned it :)
  - modeless 6y ago
    It's a good one! You helping out with the ML at Neuralink at all? Maybe someday Autopilot could learn something from recordings of people's brains while driving :)
colordrops 6y ago
Whats the name of the employee sitting next to Elon who said it?
- ofou 6y ago
  Max Hodak (https://twitter.com/max_hodak https://twitter.com/max_hodak)
  - colordrops 6y ago
    Oh, didn't realize he was a founder.

aaron695 6y ago

The fact Elon talks about the universe stared as leptons and not hydrogen as many pop sci shows do is a good example of his whole game plan. Understand things at their lowest level and build. Disrupt at the lowest level you can.

typon 6y ago
Why pick leptons? Why not quarks? It's arbitrary.
- qntmfred 6y ago
  Elon did say quarks and leptons.
- aaron695 6y ago
  Did you say this because you really hate Elon or are really into the Universes first few second :) (Elon got it right)

0wis 6y ago

Once again a project that seems to have gone from the drawing table to redesign the prototype. And now well under way ! What I'm the most curious about is how they plan to handle exceptions and failure modes to keep it unharmful.

anorphirith 6y ago

they mentioned you can "record backup and replay memories" and potentially transfer them into a new body

tryauuum 6y ago
and they mentioned it is gonna be in the future (some completely undefined amount of time lately, so technically it is not a lie)
gruez 6y ago
>transfer More like, copy to the new body and kill the old one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox
handol 6y ago
Neuralink v1.0 has all the hardware for self-driving.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

If human brains merge with computers, I hope we are running free software in our heads. The idea of code you cannot observe or control, in your head, seems like an attack on humanity. I'd like to see this put into actual law from the start, possibly at the level of a UN Human Rights declaration. I'm not interested in living in a world with an app store for your brain. As an aside, the technical capability for true mind-reading doesn't seem too far fetched anymore. I don't think society is currently structured to accept the consequences of that. People are not what they appear to be on the outside.

benmller313 6y ago
If you don't want proprietary software in your head, don't install it in your head. Why do you need the UN to stop you from doing that to yourself?
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  It's naive to think this will be optional for long once it's viable. Oh you have X,Y,Z mental illness? Treatment from or inclusion in society is contingent upon getting this chip installed.
  - zipwitch 6y ago
    Want this job? Even if it doesn't get to the level of "all employees need to be running OurCorp Headware (tm)", being required to be running Microsoft Headwindows in order to get a job with medical benefits seems ominously plausible.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Want to use the neuraIM to talk with family and friends? I know you'd prefer a FLOSS nIRC client, but everyone you know is already on WhatsBrain.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    Let alone forcibly installing such a chip as "for the persons own good". Or more likely "to stop terrorists" due to needing an excuse. That's almost definitely going to happen. If the tech were available today we'd probably be hearing disturbing leaks of forced chip installation in people heads in various countries already. :(

blackbear_ 6y ago

"This is starting to sound like a black mirror episode... Well, I guess they're just very good at predicting" - Elon Musk

Tuxer 6y ago

I'm surprised nobody talked about the potential implications of effectively embedding, now that the device is standalone, a lithium ion battery into your skull. I'm not a battery hater whatsoever but in the case of a thermal runoff if the battery starts burning... there is no way to get it out.

BillinghamJ 6y ago
I wondered about this, but is it not already the case with other existing devices like pacemakers etc?
- nmstoker 6y ago
  Yes, and that's why there are such high standards for medical devices. In the presentation Elon specifically mentions their involvement with the FDA and highlighted their focus on safety (drawing a parallel with Tesla five star ratings)
polytely 6y ago
Seems like a nightmare now that I think about it, like you get a ransomware popup beamed into your visual cortex saying: "We are in your brain, wire the contents of your bank account to the following bitcoin adres: <adress>. If you do not comply, we will blow up your neuralink, if you try to alert anyone, we will blow up your neuralink. We are watching, you have 2 hours, good luck." "01:59:59" "01:59:58" ...
- zipwitch 6y ago
  "it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the ... middle all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who's somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself." -Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age
- 6y ago

jv22222 6y ago

This makes me feel uneasy, and weird, but... I think I like it. It's probably all those movies written about the subject (ie Matrix) that add to the uneasiness. I like how he focuses on safety aspects and that it's reversible etc.

zuhayeer 6y ago

Not only are you going to have to charge your phone, watch, headphones, and glasses, but you're gonna have to remember to charge your brain now too

codeisawesome 6y ago
Well, un-dismissible pop up screens that can even wake you from sleep might help... until it’s used for more than battery charge notifications
nmstoker 6y ago
Although presumably, given the device is plugged directly into your brain, they can make it remind you of this in friendly way.
balfirevic 6y ago
> but you're gonna have to remember to charge your brain now too Well, try not sleeping for a few days :)
- zuhayeer 6y ago
  touché
neillyons 6y ago
"Can I borrow your charger my brain is dead" lol
tintor 6y ago
The wireless charger could be installed in the bed itself, or in the headrest of your car seat.
- est31 6y ago
  Can't wait for the daily rush on the cranial induction seats on commuter trains.

ethanwillis 6y ago

This absolutely should not be allowed to be done. We are treading on dangerous territory, except everyone is excitedly plodding forward without a second thought.

mysterEFrank 6y ago
I agree. This work is incredibly cool scientifically but this seems too dangerous to pursue further
- drannex 6y ago
  - Said everyone who saw the first computers, planes, automobiles, trains, bikes, phones, telegram, and likely the wheel.
  - mysterEFrank 6y ago
    I'm sure everybody who saw the first nuclear bomb said this too, and they were right. I am become death
    - aero-glide 6y ago
      One could argue nuclear bombs and MAD are the reason there hasn't been a third world war. Someone asked an engineer who designed ICBMs : How do you feel that things you worked on may never actually be used? He said, then I have succeeded. The purpose has always been to act as an deterrent. If my work was used, then somewhere something has failed. Off topic to neuralink, but found it interesting.
neckardt 6y ago
Could you elaborate on why this is dangerous and shouldn't be done?
emteycz 6y ago
This was already being done way before Musk, for medical reasons. You can't expect people to put society in front of their own health.

ofou 6y ago

Sometimes I think that we are going to become the AI that Elon Musk is trying to prepare us to fight against to. This technology is literally opening pandora's box. Both the amazing and scariest thing in the world will come out. Pretty crazy times we are living. Cannot highlight this enough, we're summoning the demon hacking our brains.

colordrops 6y ago
If AI becomes vastly more intelligent than humans as he predicts, a neural implant is nothing more than a teddy bear to make us feel better. If we augment ourselves with AI, our expanded selves will see the brain as vestigial and slowing us down, eventually excising it, then we become full machines. In a way, transitioning like this, rather than only creating non-human AI in parallel, would hopefully transfer some of our humanity into the machines. In any case we would look back at this transition as a natural metamorphosis. I wouldn't be surprised if this metamorphosis is a natural emergent phenomenon among civilizations across the universe.
- ofou 6y ago
  My point is that Human + AI = AI. There's no AI around the corner as far as we know, but you can argue that the portion of machine intelligence is growing at a crazy rate. So, we're becoming slowly an AI as you correctly pointed out, maybe it's just plain evolution. I wonder if no AI comes out after all (by itself), we'll be the One created through ourselves.
  - metroholografix 6y ago
    The AI is already here. It's called technocapitalism. We're not becoming an AI, we're being controlled and modified by one, so as to better fit its teleology.
    - nickik 6y ago
      Is anybody else sick about literally everything people don't like being <xy>capitalism?

m0dE 6y ago

The only major technical update from its initial announcement a year ago is that they're no longer hiding the transmitter behind the participant's ear. (and pigs!) Other than that, the whole thing seemed like a recruitment attempt, but that's fine. I fully support mission, and I'd love to work for them if given opportunity. To apply: https://jobs.lever.co/neuralink https://jobs.lever.co/neuralink

spullara 6y ago
Since they started the presentation announcing it was a recruitment event, I think you are right.
mysterEFrank 6y ago
They put it in a pig brain and can use neural signals to predict the pigs behavior - that's major progress
- zaroth 6y ago
  Seriously! How much faster would people expect them to be able to run with this? Something like this is the work of a lifetime. Elon is 49, and isn’t running out of funding any time soon. It’s an incredibly costly and risky endeavor which could improve a lot of lives. I think the idea of putting it into an otherwise healthy individual is way, way off and kind of a distraction? But in the meantime if this can somehow help treat e.g. Alzheimer’s it would be an absolute godsend for millions of people.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Not behavior, motor signals. Major difference, but still, a nice achievement.

kevinskii 6y ago

I'd be happy to be corrected by an actual neuroscientist, but I don't think some folks realize just how far away the Neuralink team is from being able to do any of the things they are claiming. Inserting electrodes in the brain is the easy part. The reason no one else has yet bothered with this level of miniaturization is because it won't be of much benefit until you can figure out a way to decode the signals reliably. This is extremely daunting, and it's something that has occupied lots of brilliant people full time for decades.

nikkwong 6y ago
I actually really hope that is the case. I have a feeling of existential dread every time I imagine all the effort I am putting into learning and acquiring new skills all going to waste when those tasks become absolutely second nature to everyone, irrespective of effort or time investment. Although, I am all for fixing the existing problems that it obviously could solve; I fear my mother will succumb to Alzheimer's, and something like this is dearly needed. It just seems like we won't know when to pull the brakes.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > I actually really hope that is the case. I have a feeling of existential dread every time I imagine all the effort I am putting into learning and acquiring new skills all going to waste when those tasks become absolutely second nature to everyone, irrespective of effort or time investment. I'm not a neuroscientist, but with such a limited understanding of the brain, beyond just the anatomy and the nature of neurotransmitters, let alone consciousness, I think you can allay such fears for the time being. I think this could have significant benefits for neural diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, ALS and possibly anxiety and addiction/mania based maladies but the idea of simply being able to 'download' the ability to learn a new skill in real time seems entirely preposterous. I say that because some of the skills that I have been able to turn into careers have actually required I learn something where my brain no longer interferes with the process so that it is done effectively. The notion of muscle memory is real, meaning you cease thinking about it and it just occurs out without any effort due to continual practice and repetition: my question is how can your body recover from an unexpected/unpredictable error if you haven't already practiced that same scenario over and over, and you were only given the default normal operation of x skill? Most learning is adaptable and gained from observed behavior, be it our own or others, to mistakes. Experience is a funny thing, and our brains are flawed in recalling many of our most cherished or dreaded events and experiences accurately; I honestly think this could be a medical boon for the aforementioned diseases, but the Matrix-like learning will probably be a quixotic pursuit, in my opinion. One that sounds awesome on paper but would be horrible in practice.

Udik 6y ago

I haven't watched the whole thing, did they address the problem of writing? All I saw was detecting firing neurons from a small region of the brain (which is cool and useful in itself) but saw nothing about actually transmitting to the brain signals that the brain can interpret correctly. Which seems by far the hardest part, when the device stops being a pure observer of a tiny region of the brain.

zizee 6y ago
I believe that they did show the "threads" firing, and the neurons lighting up in response. I imagine that initially they will be focusing on blunter interventions into the brain, like detecting impending epileptic attacks, and send some sort of signal to try and interrupt it. I think such things already exist in a cruder form. It's going to be a long while, and a lot of iterations before you can expect to just "know" the contents of your latest text message.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kerbal2000 6y ago

Nobody asked the single hard question, so I'll put it here: Those types of electrodes are known to cause permanent brain tissue scaring after 1-3 years, similar to asbestos scaring. How do they intend to solve this problem?

lightgreen 6y ago
If I'm quadriplegic, I'd prefer my brain tissues scarred after 1-3 years and then new implant installed in a different spot rather than being a vegetable during that time. (And when we have these implants helping paralized people for 10 years, we will think of something. We don't need to solve all problems at once.)
vwat 6y ago
Actually every comment section out there is riddled with this question and it is directly addressed in the video. Perhaps you should watch it...

dwighttk 6y ago

Oof. I wish YouTube had more than 2x playback rate. Elon is hard to listen to at less.

Veedrac 6y ago
document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].playbackRate = 3
- dwighttk 6y ago
  thanks!

sebmanchester 6y ago

Is there some type of calibration that would be needed after implant to allow for variance? Or does the robot surgeon just have perfect accuracy in where the threads are implanted?

eigenvalue 6y ago
I don’t think it matters so much to be super precise on the positioning. The spike detection is pretty robust and then the real heavy lifting is in analyzing the patterns of spikes across the set of 1,000+ locations. And that is automatically calibrated as part of the process of getting it to work at all (that is, getting the predictions to match the reality).

cruzai 6y ago

Unimpressed, but great work..I can see potential but this is like making a plane for landing on moon we are one decade early on this technology ...Electrode impedance is a big deal that I didn't see addressed here...It hasn't been addressed for the past decade...There are so many impressive work I see like the work by Berkeley professor Jose M. Carmena that could address this issue...next Decade can be exciting.

sidcool 6y ago
Elon was pretty clear since beginning that it is nowhere near complete and the demo is to attract talent
elcritch 6y ago
Could you elaborate on which aspects of the electrode impedance?

rantwasp 6y ago

I think there are a lot of questions one might ask but I’m going to say that it’s too early to ask most of them. I’m sure that once this makes it past prototype stage and human trials are on the horizon they will need to have good questions to a lot of these questions and I have no doubt they are thinking about basic and not so basic scenarios. This is a good PR/recruiting stunt but nothing more. (Also Musk could use a little bit of training when it comes to the way he is speaking and is timing his speech)

quenix 6y ago
Musk's presentation style has been this way since forever — after watching a couple of his presentations, you kind of get used to it. He's not much of a showman.

mrwnmonm 6y ago

A comment from techcrunch: As the scientist who first published data on neuronal firing in the brain of freely-behaving primates (available at: Ludvig N. et al., 2001, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 900, pages 179-187) , I am curious to see this demonstration. I also know that in order to make any meaningful link between a human mind and a computer one must record the identified firing of at least 5 billion neurons from the "mind-generating" association cortex in behavioral and environmental contexts -- which is absolutely impossible with each and every currently available and envisioned electrophysiological technique loved or not, claimed or not, advertised or not by Musk. --- Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD Source: https://tcrn.ch/3b3YGGC https://tcrn.ch/3b3YGGC

kevinskii 6y ago
Thank you for joining the discussion. What do you think about the counterargument that they don't need to create a full mind-body interface, that they could offer a lot of benefit just by doing simpler things like predicting limb movements?
- mrwnmonm 6y ago
  It is not my comment, I just found it interesting. Sorry for the confusion.
sneak 6y ago
He and his teams seem to have been quite successful with other businesses and ideas that were within the limits of known technology: electric cars and orbital rockets and LEO communications satellites. All of these things existed before (and all credit to the mountains of hard work of SpaceX and Tesla for polishing and improving them as much as they have). Perhaps he’s not pushing the envelope enough if they haven’t attempted the actually impossible yet. I’ll be cheering for them in any case; the impossible has a pesky habit of becoming possible in the decades that building some of this stuff takes. There is no shame in trying to do the impossible and failing; proving the current impossibility of hard things has value.
- 6y ago

throwawayneural 6y ago

(throwaway.) I've been deeply interested in this field for a long time and BCIs specifically. (not to brag, just to explain:) I have a graduate degree in a related neuro field and strong & fast coding abilities. Working @ Neuralink interests me a lot. But I've also read the stories about Musk, how he treats employees, the working conditions, etc. [0] I'm not afraid of hard work but can folks here shed light whether it might be worth it (or not) to go work there? Are Tesla, SpaceX, etc. engineers generally... happy/satisfied? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18679715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18679715

kiba 6y ago
You're assuming that Elon Musk personally run each company he found as if it's his full time job. There's only one Musk.
- nickik 6y ago
  Specifically Neurolink is likely only about 5% of the time. Its about half each for Tesla and SpaceX according to him, more or less depending on what happening.
holler 6y ago
> Are Tesla, SpaceX, etc. engineers generally... happy/satisfied? I don't work at either but I have watched plenty of SpaceX product, err, rocket launches, and they seem to frequently live-stream from their Hawthorn CA headquarters with lots of gleeful & cheering employees. My impression is that at least for SpaceX, it's probably both highly demanding and highly rewarding. In another life I'd love to work at a company like that!
deegles 6y ago
There are plenty of jobs with poor working conditions where you don't get to build rockets, cars or BCIs. Not that it makes it ok, but it appears plenty of people are consciously making that tradeoff.

moneywoes 6y ago

How much would this technology cost?

suyash 6y ago
They said goal is to make it as affordable as LASIK

ofou 6y ago

My thoughts on @neuralink The Good: Explore by direct observation/interaction the brain, cure countless disseases along the way, and eventually augment humans. The Bad: Privacy, Hacking, identity theft, memory implants, infinite dystopias. The Ugly: The rich/poor divide will be cognitive.

lightgreen 6y ago
There were thousands of similar predictions when mobile phones were created. Literally, when any new technology created, people started predicting dooms.
- ofou 6y ago
  Yes, business as usual but what is actually unpredictable are second or even third order effects from the deployment of technologies. Taking social networks as example, USA's president sounds like doom to me.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    Before social networks TV influenced president elections, radio before that, and newspapers before radio. Each time media changes, it is doom.
    - ofou 6y ago
      It is curious to see that the rate of change is the sole thing that accelerates between medias across time. Let's imagine a 1000000x speed scenario among virtually all human endevours. Maybe not doom but that's all folks. By the way, I'm optimistic about the future.
    - asdff 6y ago
      This is a little bit of a false equivalency imo. You can walk away from a TV. This is literally inside your brain. Imagine if a bad actor got the reigns, or if a nation had a back door installed for their version for direct access to their citizens. Literal mind control that you can't escape from at all. No one is at the TV for 24 hours a day. Imagine if a kill switch were possible, ushering the era of death by keystroke hundreds of miles away. You can't kill someone with a TV, or a radio, or a newspaper.

torotonnato 6y ago

The efforts made by Neuralink’s team are impressive and, IMO, the idea is very serious, with lots of practical short term consequences as well. Someone said that getting electrodes into the brain is the easiest part, but I beg to differ on this, for the simple reason that data is more accessible, abundant and clean than ever. Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data. Now, on the demo and its tech: some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? The stacks I used in my embedded projects were simply horrible and I’m heavily biased against BT even on principle :D What about the electrodes being, in the end, simple conductors and, so, antennas? I’d hate to be in a NMR machine with a NL in my head (thunderstorms too? An attacker with a jammer?!). I was expecting a write demo too, but maybe it’s not something you want to be streamed online for the general public. Last thought: the pig limbs prediction task. I think that the prediction was greatly aided by the chosen setting of the experiment (tapis roulant), but still impressive. I’m sure that today we saw a very important piece of human history unfold before out very own eyes

modeless 6y ago
They talked about security and explicitly mentioned that the Bluetooth radio is hardware isolated in some way. They mentioned using encryption without detail but I expect that the radios are treated as untrusted. Also they are using third party penetration testing.
visarga 6y ago
> some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? Being Bluetooth, you probably have to retry a few times to get it to connect and will fail frequently from WiFi interference. Also, the BT software stack is a mess. For example I have problems connecting AirPods to MacBooks (recent ones), same company on both sides, still not working reliably. BT is a shit technology if there ever was one.
tsimionescu 6y ago
> Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data. That is only true if the data is likely to be the right data. For motor control, electrical signals seem to be pretty much it. But we have no clear proof that the same is true for higher thought processes - it could well be that chemical signals and processing inside each neuron itself are major components of that, so the data would be massively limited. It would also be interesting to see how well such an approach would do when tried on a microprocessor - could we tell that a microprocessor is displaying "hello world" by sampling electrical signals from its transistors and trying to apply some kind of machine learning on that data?

jhales 6y ago

How do they decide where to place the electrodes? And how do they keep them fixed in the right position?

tintor 6y ago
- They focus on avoiding blood vessels. It is up to the software to learn the mapping, after implantation. - They talked about flexibility, slack of electrodes, and pig head-butting. :)

xwdv 6y ago

I would love to be able to control vim entirely through Neuralink. Using vim already feels like I’m coding at the speed of thought, this would literally be the speed of thought. The era of the 100x developer is coming.

throwaw4y-plate 6y ago

Was there any mention of glial scarring anywhere?

visarga 6y ago

Can't wait to have neural data associated to text and images for multi-modal training of neural nets. Up to present we have had the basic modalities: video, image, audio and text, now we can have a new modality which is more direct than even speech, remains to see how much of the embedding space it can cover.

panjo 6y ago

I'm so excited by this and I'm glad that someone like Elon is finally concentrating on agri-tech. This is great news for pig farmers. Imagine being able to control the amount of exercise they take, to bring them inside automatically and send them back out on a schedule. If they get rustled or lost somehow they could be ordered to walk back to the farm. I'm sure this will revolutionize farming.

elliottbavarian 6y ago

What is technological progress without the courage to try. To challenge what is impossible by all modern reason.

benjohnson1707 6y ago

The big difference between him and top notch medical experts seems to be this : piles of cash and cutting edge tech across all disciplines thrown at a problem. It's not common that a research proposal gets granted hundreds of millions of funding. But here is what I've learned from Tesla/SpaceX: Cutting-edge tech changes the initial conditions of a problem. How things are measured, analyzed, manufactured, simulated etc. The only things that are fundamentally constraining are the laws of nature. As long as you don't violate them, things can be done, potentially (in principle). That why Musk has been like: OK, I see a feasible trajectory, so let's throw money and talent at the problem and see how it goes. Which by the way is how progress works. Pushing things. Experts (especially scientists) have acquired their expertise within certain initial conditions. Initial conditions incorporate assumptions that might be outdated after having thrown money and tech at the issue. That's why Musk doesn't give a damn about conventional wisdom but in my opinion only cares about the fundamental physics when it comes to basic feasibility. What seems to be different compared to a lot of others seems to be that he is a scientific mind by training and a hardcore engineer by profession. Plus basic economics literacy and tons of money. You usually find only one or those traits in people. Tldr : his mantra is 'question your constraints'... Let's see how well that goes with this project

hcineb 6y ago

Neuroscientist here. I have personally implanted many animals of different species with similar apparatus as the ones described by neuralink, and published numerous papers in the field, including theoretical papers on neural activity coding and modeling. Here are my two cents about this. Sorry if it’s long, I m hoping that this will help provide perspective on the topic at hand. As a scientist, the first thing that is striking is that this is another example of science by press conference. It’s probably why there is a lot of eye rolling in the field. No data has been released (including in the single author elon musk paper published a couple of years ago), and it is therefore impossible to judge the results independently, let alone have a scientific discussion about it. First off, it should be noted that not much here is completely new. Chronic implantation of multielectrode arrays, with wireless recordings have been around for roughly 15 years. These arrays are able to record and stimulate. This is usually done in mice, in which space is even more limited than the pig. The number of contacts (i.e recording points) of 1000 is also on par with the current state of the art (see, e.g the neuropixel implants). The fact that neuralink managed to reproduce this seemingly from scratch is an impressive feat, but in no way is it novel. Dozens of labs around the world do this every day. The issues with electrode recordings are to get close enough to each cell without damanging anything. If the contact is too far, the recording is polluted by other neurons, and one has to rely on blind signal separation to make out each cell. As a result in typical experiments, each electrode is manually positioned In the close vicinity of the neuron (think micrometers). This is a challenge with large arrays because each contact is not independant which reduces the yield. This likely happens here. Another important problem arises with chronic implantantion. When you insert something in the brain, make it as thin as you wish the brain will not like it. There is going to be pushing and shoving of cells, and when the brain reset in position (within minutes) it will have moved. This requires fine tuning of each electrode’s position to keep it close to the neurons. More importantly, it will create a scar. Cells will die around it, the organism will try and isolate the foreign object. This takes weeks. This is the reason why, roughly speaking, no single cell has been recorded from for more than weeks (the record i believe is around 3 months): after a while the electrode is simply too isolated from the actual neurons to pick up a signal. There are endeavors around this, With other electrode materials, etc but neuralink does not do that. (Another really cool way to do chronic implant is with calcium imaging with small implanted confocal microscopes) In addition, this is likely bad for the organism, and possibly not something you would want happen in your brain. BTW I believe that (in addition to size constraints) this is why they are doing studies on pigs now (although their neural activity is not well documented as opposed to mice/rats or primates): it is commonly used as a model for human injuries. Finally, do be aware that some humans are already implanted chronically in the brain with electrodes: - For parkinsons, in a specific, non cortical area. These electrodes can record and stimulate to alleviate crises - For hearing, it’s not stricto sensu in the brain (in the cochlear cavities) but it stimulates neurons - On the surface of the brain, with ecog electrodes mostly used during surgery but sometimes chronically for epilepsy diagnosis In addition to these technical issues (which are serious enough, by the way), the claims made here are just sort of outlandish. Even in very well controlled laboratory conditions, there is very little evidence that it is remotely possible to “record” memories (let alone replay them). For the most part it is because we have _strictly no idea_ how _anything is encoded_ in the brain (there is even raging debate as to whether it “encodes” anything). (Sorry to my neuroscientist friends and colleagues, but we are not close to anything the layperson would qualify as “understanding what the brain does”, by a long stretch.) In addition, some of the less outlandish claims (e.g. controlling robotic limbs, etc) made by neuralink are things on which neuroscientists have been working on for decades. It’s not impossible for sure (as many of us argue in their grant proposals), but it is hard. And the plan presented by neuralink (more electrodes) is in no way innovative to an insider in the field. In fact, I doubt that it would get NIH funding. TLDR there are many well documented issues with this endeavor that many people have been working on for decades. It’s frustrating that the general public be exposed to the uninteresting sugar coated sci fi version of an otherwise complex, nuanced and thus interesting field of science.

andai 6y ago

I have to wonder if the electrodes and implants are really necessary? Mary Lou Jepsen is working on reading and writing activity to individual neurons using infrared holography -- a wearable device.

emteycz 6y ago
If someone else is interested, I found this recent video on the topic:https://youtu.be/CqsglRFjEKI https://youtu.be/CqsglRFjEKI

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> What Dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the Neuralink, remove it, and be healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig. If I understand correctly, this is a device that can turn a person into a pig?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Nah, that's the web browser, invented a while ago.

ytninja 6y ago

where can I find the source code for neuralink in GitHub?

ytninja 6y ago

which should I learn now assembly or c for neuralink programming? or I don't need to learn anything after surgery I can install all directly to my brain?