25 ms·

Co-founder of Neuralink leaves the company

192 points by cpeterso 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
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sillysaurusx 6y ago
How many other high-profile startups have survived a cofounder split like this? It doesn't seem disastrous, necessarily – Drodopbox probably would have happened with Drew, but not without Drew – but it's ... not exactly a happy thing. It's hard to imagine Stripe without one of the Collisons, or OpenAI without gdb.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  I think it's a much smaller signaling risk, especially given how much time has passed and the number of founders (9 total, including Musk). The Paypal Mafia tends to structure their companies this way... a large, tiered system of founders and junior founders. This is more like losing an early team member than, for example, a Collison. (Also, it's ironic you cited OpenAI, since it did lose a founder... Musk)
theontheone 6y ago
That makes only 2 of the original 8 founding scientists left. https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-update-brain-machine-implants/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-upda... Elon Musk has been pretty successful at getting top talent to push the limits of engineering, but with neuroscience, it seems the research isn't there yet. What I'm really interested to see is how long Karpathy will stay at Tesla as other self driving projects drop like flies (ATG, Zoox, and most recently L5)
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Am I imagining it, or have scientists across the board left lots of AI startups recently? OpenAI just had a big split too where a bunch left.
  - bpodgursky 6y ago
    Yeah but in a lot of cases it's because money (especially AI fundraising money) is hella cheap and it's far more profitable (like, 10-100x) to co-found their own AI startup than to play senior scientist for someone else.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      Capitalism truly is the most efficient way to allocate resources. ;) Less snarky response, perhaps if we saw more worker coops we'd care less about being a founder and more about delivering a result.
      - ekianjo 6y ago
        There is no capitalism at work when there is no product sold.
        jobigoud 6y ago
        Why? You can sell a dream.
        throwaway3699 6y ago
        Nobody seriously considers 'SV investors' to be a market. That is not how people get rich, anyway.
        hoseja 6y ago
        You must feel quite oxymoronic, being here.
      - ajwin 6y ago
        Start one! Everyone who mentions them should start one. Work super hard to get it started, deal with all the politics and then get voted out.
      - 6y ago
- gjdjfnfhdbf 6y ago
  Good to know, I may have to give Neuralink another try. My previous experience with the original 8 a few years ago during the hiring process was overwhelmingly negative. I'm hoping their culture has changed to be more in line with Musk's public persona since then.
  - _qwfv 6y ago
    Musk's public persona is a nightmare, even if you only look at his public professional persona -- encouraging overwork, getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates, a total disregard for safety of both his customers and his workers, and developing an unhealthy cult of personality. I own a Tesla, I love SpaceX, I think Elon Musk is insufferable.
    - gjdjfnfhdbf 6y ago
      Fair points, but one trait that I do admire is his lack of elitism. That was sorely missing at Neuralink when I visited.
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      > getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates This is both a strength and weakness. How many times have people wished CEOs actually knew what they were talking about? As long as Elon knows enough to build a decent team and lead it well, he doesn't need to know everything. From the outside it looks like he sees himself as 'one of the engineers' which is something I deeply respect, even if there's major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        Yeah, I appreciate any engineering firm that at least attempts to have some engineering leadership in charge. > major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones). That Vegas loop too... That's going to be a truly awful tunnel fire someday, and the safety systems there seem seriously lacking. (Also, the whole project feels like a grift.)
- _coveredInBees 6y ago
  I dunno, self-driving is an interesting computer-vision / machine-learning problem and it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on. For anyone working in the field, the end goal is extremely rewarding in terms of the long-term beneficial impact on society it would have and the numerous lives it would save. I don't think Tesla is going to drop FSD R&D anytime soon. They've also built out amazing software infrastructure under Karpathy's leadership to make use of their fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars to run shadow experiments with newer models in the background and continuously collect more difficult and interesting training data so they can improve their models and their internal test-sets for tracking metrics. They are also a relatively lean team from what I've heard, so it's not like they are bankrolling hundreds of very expensive ML PhDs at the moment. It is debatable if they (or anyone else) will "solve" FSD with current approaches, but I think the technology is already pretty fascinating and useful.
  - shaan7 6y ago
    > it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
    - wiz21c 6y ago
      Yup double yup ! > numerous lives it would save If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.
      - XorNot 6y ago
        These are political problems, it's a different skillset.
      - logicchains 6y ago
        Globally around 1.3 million people are killed in motor accidents yearly and tens of millions more are permanently disabled (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...). In comparison there are around 0.4 million malaria deaths annually (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria). So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  TLDR: This technology is in its infancy but is very much so in the R&D phase. He needs to retain top scientists and avoid making promises. The research isn't there yet, which is why Elon should be trying to retain people who have deeply studied the hippocampus and brain. What the heck is he doing? Find the best people in this domain. The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. He needs more researchers in the fundamentals. I think if they've built the robot that inserts the electrodes non-invasively, they can continue to add additional electrodes and get an even more accurate measurement of what's happening elsewhere in the brain. This tech will takes years and years to master. Neuralink a science company. Or at least, it should be at this point if I'm taking it seriously. God knows there are hundreds of tech companies selling SAAS software for domains that have negligible research. Neuralink shouldn't be like that. Don't overpromise and underdeliver just yet, causing best people to leave. This company has tons of potential.
  - f6v 6y ago
    > It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Not a neuroscientist, but it seems like the problem is more involved than just training a DL model on a data. We need detailed maps of the brain before we put any electrodes in it. Meanwhile, full mouse brain map is likely a decade away [0]. Humans have a bigger brain, imagine how long it’d take. It’s just a lot of manual labor which takes incredibly long time. Keep in mind that you also need to map thousands, if not millions of brains to model population heterogeneity. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    > The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. This is an unproven hypothesis. Since we do not know how computation actually happens in the brain, we can't say for sure that electrical signals can be matched to the actual computations happening, even if they are correlated. It is still possible that the electrical signals we are measuring are just byproducts, and that the real compatation happens at a chemical level or inside each individual neuron or even in microtubules as Penrose believed. The nice part is that this means that neuralink's attempts could be extremely useful to our understanding of the brain even if they fail - it would actually be an amazing discovery if they could show that you CAN'T deduce the brain's intent from observing electrical activities. We do know for sure though that you can use electrical signals to interface with motor neurons, so at least improvements in prosthetics should be something that neuralink can realistically deliver.
- deleted 6y ago
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- interactivecode 6y ago
  Ever since I learned that Musk didn't found Tesla [0] or PayPal [1] I get really uncomfortable when reading news like this. It's clearly Musk doing another hostile take over of a company someone else started. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–200... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history
  - prestigious 6y ago
    I mean tesla without Elon is not really tesla. I never really thought he FOUNDED PayPal, but rather part of the so-called PayPal mafia that was successful at starting other companies. I never heard that he didn’t pull his weight from Peter thiel or the others
    - papito 6y ago
      I only wish I was slightly older during the dot com boom. I had to finish college and do it with flying colors, being from a poor family. If you had the means and some padding to take fairly reasonable risks, you walked away with riches. These people were at the right place and the right time, let's not lionize them as investment geniuses. They had money to put down on some horses, that is ALL.
      - wayoutthere 6y ago
        It was certainly no sure thing, and it’s easy to say that in hindsight. There were definitely a lot of people who walked away from the dot-com era with worthless stock options and wounded egos. Plenty of people ended up taking the “safe” route too and getting a job at IBM. We’re in the same place with crypto right now. People will look back and say “oh jeez if only”. The early bazillionaires are already minted but there are a lot of crypto millionaires made every day. It’s just a lot of people dumping their life savings into BTC/ETH and enjoying the ride.
      - throwaway316943 6y ago
        That doesn’t line up with what I’ve read about that time period. A lot of the companies that were well funded by such bets went bankrupt. In all likelihood you would have lost money during the bust. The companies that weathered the storm were actually delivering good products and had cash flow. That takes a lot of work on the tech and business sides. Maybe you could have timed the bubble and exited with a pile of cash, who knows. If you want to make those kinds of bets you could make them right now.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  >but with neuroscience, it seems the research isn't there yet. The interesting aspect of your comment is in fact: what is the capital outlay and time needed for the science to actually get there. Elon has a track record of severely under-estimating those, but he is also smart enough (via PR / govt grants / leveraging past successes, etc ...) to stretch both beyond anything reasonable, to the point of actually reaching success (e.g. TESLA, SpaceX).
- beyondarmonia 6y ago
  I really wouldn't go far based on that list. It's mostly from the Waitbutwhy article from years ago when they were still basically a research/brainstorming group and hadn't even figured out what they wanted to do or what approach they wanted to take. For comparison to Musk's other companies , it's analogous to Bill Cantrell or Mike Griffin or that guy from sea launch at SpaceX. Some in this group were very briefly there like Tim Hanson. Some I think are misreported to not be there , unless anyone has any extra information. For example , Paul Merolla was there at the last conference , even though he's reported as not being with the company. Some I think are also advisors like Sabes , unless something has changed. One of them is just a neurosurgeon , but they already have a whole surgery department with a lead now.
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- stunt 6y ago
  Getting top talents or investing on top talents? He has the money and he has the guts to take big risks which is remarkable for an investor. I think any scientist with a "revolutionary" idea that requires lots of capital will proactively approach Elon Musk.
- gmadsen 6y ago
  Zoox is very much still doing self driving...
kumarvvr 6y ago
I wonder how much did ethical concerns contributed to that decision. I am conflicted about neural-link. On one hand, if successful, it will improve lives of many disabled persons. On the other hand, fiddling with nature in this manner has never been good for anyone involved. I mean, poking things into your brain to control external devices, does humanity really need such tech?
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Imagine if you could record your memories and play them back to yourself or others. Consider having an entire generation of family memories accessible to those who have dementia/alzheimer's. This technology will be life changing, consumer applications aside.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    For any new technology it is important to ask, who will have access and how will we treat those without access. Sometimes new tech enriches all our lives, nearly everyone benefits from renewable energy for instance. In other cases you risk furthering the divide between haves and have nots. When a person experiencing homelessness has their neural device go bad, how do we ensure they aren't just left in the street suffering? Are we comfortable living in a world where the elderly are permitted to suffer from Alzheimer's when we have a cure like you describe, just because they were too poor to afford treatment? Secondly, it is important to ask, how could the technology be used if greed or maliciousness are the main motivators. Do those downsides outweigh the positives? I'm moderately bullish on brain computer interfaces, but I caution or challenge people to put on their engineering hats and really think deeply about both the positives and negatives of new technology.
    - rdedev 6y ago
      Isn't it already happening now ? Many people simply don't go to the doctor because of the associated costs. But this dosent mean we shouldnt do research into curing diseases. A better solution to the scenario you provided above would be a nationalised healthcare system, or atleast something close to it where people can get a basic amount of care without having to think about money
natch 6y ago
Having had some very minimal observation of Max up close at another venue, I was intrigued to see him in the position. Smart guy. Is it possible to be too self assured? One of his best attributes, having a bold disregard for limits most people set, in some ways did make him a great match for the initial phase imho. Not sure if speculation is frowned on here, but let me label this clearly as speculation: I’m guessing the company is ready in the next phase to have a CEO who is more of a cultural fit with the medical community. Meaning a little more of a conventional, conservative (not in the politics sense), mild person. Max is a bit more of a take charge and get it done type, not a soothing type. Again though this is based on very little anecdata.
yayr 6y ago
I am not sure, that the interface tech with brain invasion is the best route going forward in the space. There is work on non-invasive alternatives, that promise sooner results for some use cases, e.g. https://www.mindportal.com https://www.mindportal.com
- phito 6y ago
  Sounds interesting but the website doesn't talk at all about how it is done. I'm left wondering if they have something or are just doing research?
hellothere1337 6y ago
Hopefully it's a brief respite. The day we manage to create a brain interface is the day when the privacy of our own thoughts will begin to fade.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  You could always choose not to put an Alexa in a brain? Why stop people from doing what they want to with their bodies?
  - kakkan 6y ago
    You can always choose to not use a phone or the internet? The difference is that life becomes hard when you wanna opt out of a mainstream technology that we fully do not understand.
    - hellothere1337 6y ago
      Indeed if you want to make a living opting out of certain technologies is impossible despite their invasive effects. Imagine competing with a programmer than can solve leetcode / code an entire system in a few seconds using such a brain interface. It would be somewhat difficult to attain that kind of productivity with old I/O devices
    - ramraj07 6y ago
      This might be true but if something is possible, made acceptable by the majority (even if it’s detrimental to them in the long term), and is capitalizable for commercial gain I doubt you or anyone can stop it from happening. Technology will progress to places wherever it can, the only way to at least slow it is to make it illegal.
admissionsguy 6y ago
I have no idea if the same is the case in here, but Musk had to purge the senior leadership of both Tesla and SpaceX (and multiple times at that, I believe?) in order to achieve the innovation velocity he aimed for. On each occasion the press called a setback what amounted to losing deadweight, people too invested in legacy ways of doing things, and the companies went on to far surpass the most optimistic expectations.
- vmception 6y ago
  I mostly agree but primarily because departures are inherently non-news. I acknowledge that there is little transparency in the private sector (I'm not suggesting that there should be) and for companies of public interest the public must grasp at straws, such as departures. I can also acknowledge that executive and governance "challenges" can have a high correlation with corporate distress, but it's probably not much different than the general distribution of companies. People's expectations of what other's careers should look like is warped. I think mostly because people wish they were founders or valued personnel for a project they would get married to. But there is little utility in being married to a forever project, they should appreciate the utility that was provided for the time it was relevant.
- aero-glide2 6y ago
  Can you tell more about the SpaceX purge?
  - beyondarmonia 6y ago
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-insight-idUKKCN1N50FC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-insight-i...
- ObserverNeutral 6y ago
  > far surpass the most optimistic expectations. Both companies are leechers for government money, that's all they do. The best product from Tesla is the hype they sell to public officials to take government money and the hype they sell to retail investors to take their money to pump the stock. People compare it to Amazon, they are not even in the same league, not the same ballpark
Tepix 6y ago
One of the goals of Neuralink is increasing the bandwidth between the brain and a computer. What if a brain is just inherently slow when transmitting? Apparently all languages average 39 bits transmission rate. Perhaps that's because its how fast we can collect our thoughts? https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-hav...
- vmception 6y ago
  > What if a brain is just inherently slow when transmitting? I don't get that impression. That's the entire counterpoint. Maybe others can elaborate. Language is the slow bus.
  - adampk 6y ago
    User Illusion made the point that your consciousness can only ingest 40 bits/s. So the reason language is "slow" is because there is no reason to deliver information at a higher rate than people can ingest it. https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-Penguin/dp/0140230122 https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-P...
- HeadHonchoSP 6y ago
  Language is abstract of brain function. Neurons fire electrical signals in milliseconds some cases even faster, words come second as a result of the firing. I'd think that neuralink is trying to figure out right now what fires where and at what time in the brain to effectively capture and transfer it into bits imho.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  I go back and forth on this myself. To some extent, I expect it involves the whole 'thinking fast and slow' set of tradeoffs. However, there are states of mind I've both read about and experienced, where it seems like you can fit a much more complete, rapid and specific understanding of a complex situation's interconnections in thought than you can get across in the bandwidth of speech. This is part of why we invented slide shows, haha. But in all seriousness, one of the more interesting outcomes here could be the ability to 'project' a complex thought/feeling experience in a way that speeds up the propagation of knowledge & understanding. Something like this could revolutionize everything from education to mental health. It's super uncertain if we'll ever achieve that, but we could learn some useful things on the way. For me, the biggest questions are, can we significantly speed up the learning process, what types of learning work best or worst, and how can we use this to better understand the brain? If you haven't seen it yet, here [https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html] is an extremely long, cartoon-filled, fanboy description of Neuralink's potential which somewhat discusses these ideas and a lot more.
jaimex2 6y ago
Wasnt working hard enough to meet Musks standards.
leesec 6y ago
I feel like I read this same article about Starlink's program early on, swapping out a big chunk of core players. Seemed to work out for them.
tediousdemise 6y ago
I don't really blame anyone for leaving one of Elon Musk's portfolio of companies. Reviews of Muskian company culture on sites like Reddit and Glassdoor make it seem like a very poor work-life balance. You must be over-enthusiastic about the product and willing to work brutal overtime hours for little more than a market rate engineering salary. Hard pass.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > You must be over-enthusiastic about the product and willing to work brutal overtime hours for little more than a market rate engineering salary. That sums it up. These environments can produce a lot faster, but they require a steady stream of new hires to replace all of the departures. Most hires know what they’re getting into. Spending a few years at a Musk company is a career boost, and they know it. Once you’ve had the resume boost it’s easy to pivot into another company as “the person who worked with Elon” where you can get paid more and work less.
  - boringg 6y ago
    It's rebranding the consultant model but instead of working for clients you work on products. Churn and burn. And instead of just hired guns you work on a real world problem that you hopefully believe.
40four 6y ago
I'm not sure why this really matters? As someone who is personally indifferent to Elon, this is not very interesting. To Elon detractors and people who want to see him fail, it just seems like an opportunity to 'dunk' on him in the media. People come and go from companies for various reasons, doesn't mean they are doomed. I'm not an expert on Neuralink, but the little bit I've seen from them it seems like they are in very early exploratory stages. I imagine this is an area of science that's very well understood. So they are likely blazing a path into uncharted territory. If the least they do is make meaningful contributions or discoveries in this field, I still think that's pretty awesome. As far as delivering a product? I'm not aware that they've promised anything as far as that. Sure like most Musk companies they talk big game and throw around lofty concepts, but that's always been their strategy to churn up interest in the media. Presumably they intent to start out with some type of device to assist paralyzed folks interact with computers/ phones. If they do achieve this, that would be remarkable. But this is realistically still what, just a guess, 3-5 years away?
- disabled 6y ago
  It is because Musk is making claims that are not technically possible, and may never be technically possible. Experts have warned him against making these claims, but he is in contempt of them. So, it is no wonder why people are leaving. Knowing how Silicon Valley operates, it would be likely that he would copy somebody's groundbreaking research (without giving proper credit) and make a few changes (to commercialize it, with gimmicky features) and have his claim to fame.
  - mpfundstein 6y ago
    'may never' and here u got it.
  - johncoogan 6y ago
    By "never be technically possible" do you mean: Not possible in the usual 10 year timeframe we consider for Silicon Valley type companies. Or Never in a million years, completely violates the laws of physics.
  - 6y ago
sentinel 6y ago
> Elon Musk's firm has yet to ship a product. The article starts out strong lol. No bias here.
wyxuan 6y ago
I think that Facebook with their acquisition of Ctrl labs are further ahead than most people think I’in HCI and might even be ahead of neurallink, especially as Facebook has significantly more money behind their effort.
- theontheone 6y ago
  Yeah CTRL labs has been flying under the radar, but they have a ton of top talent and already demonstrated insane results. I will go further to say they are easily ahead of neuralink in terms of bringing a faster-bandwidth interface; of course, for more ambitious projects that Musk has tweeted about like mental health disorders, you must go through the brain, but there's no indication the neuralink approach will scale to this either.
mjgs 6y ago
I wonder if they’ll release some of the code open source. It would be cool to see some of this early brain chip code.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  I'm not so interested in the code - unless I have a very expensive custom silicon fab, I probably can't create my own version. I would like to see them doing extensive data dumps of the data their hardware collects from the brains. That seems like an obvious thing to do, since the likely outcome is researchers will find new ways to analyze and use the data. Obviously with human subjects there could be severe privacy implications (you might be literally publishing your inner thoughts, even though nobody knows how to analyze them yet). But for animals this should be fine.

192 points by cpeterso 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

How many other high-profile startups have survived a cofounder split like this? It doesn't seem disastrous, necessarily – Drodopbox probably would have happened with Drew, but not without Drew – but it's ... not exactly a happy thing. It's hard to imagine Stripe without one of the Collisons, or OpenAI without gdb.

gkoberger 6y ago
I think it's a much smaller signaling risk, especially given how much time has passed and the number of founders (9 total, including Musk). The Paypal Mafia tends to structure their companies this way... a large, tiered system of founders and junior founders. This is more like losing an early team member than, for example, a Collison. (Also, it's ironic you cited OpenAI, since it did lose a founder... Musk)

theontheone 6y ago

That makes only 2 of the original 8 founding scientists left. https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-update-brain-machine-implants/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-upda... Elon Musk has been pretty successful at getting top talent to push the limits of engineering, but with neuroscience, it seems the research isn't there yet. What I'm really interested to see is how long Karpathy will stay at Tesla as other self driving projects drop like flies (ATG, Zoox, and most recently L5)

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Am I imagining it, or have scientists across the board left lots of AI startups recently? OpenAI just had a big split too where a bunch left.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  Yeah but in a lot of cases it's because money (especially AI fundraising money) is hella cheap and it's far more profitable (like, 10-100x) to co-found their own AI startup than to play senior scientist for someone else.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Capitalism truly is the most efficient way to allocate resources. ;) Less snarky response, perhaps if we saw more worker coops we'd care less about being a founder and more about delivering a result.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      There is no capitalism at work when there is no product sold.
      - jobigoud 6y ago
        Why? You can sell a dream.
        throwaway3699 6y ago
        Nobody seriously considers 'SV investors' to be a market. That is not how people get rich, anyway.
        hoseja 6y ago
        You must feel quite oxymoronic, being here.
    - ajwin 6y ago
      Start one! Everyone who mentions them should start one. Work super hard to get it started, deal with all the politics and then get voted out.
    - 6y ago
gjdjfnfhdbf 6y ago
Good to know, I may have to give Neuralink another try. My previous experience with the original 8 a few years ago during the hiring process was overwhelmingly negative. I'm hoping their culture has changed to be more in line with Musk's public persona since then.
- _qwfv 6y ago
  Musk's public persona is a nightmare, even if you only look at his public professional persona -- encouraging overwork, getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates, a total disregard for safety of both his customers and his workers, and developing an unhealthy cult of personality. I own a Tesla, I love SpaceX, I think Elon Musk is insufferable.
  - gjdjfnfhdbf 6y ago
    Fair points, but one trait that I do admire is his lack of elitism. That was sorely missing at Neuralink when I visited.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    > getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates This is both a strength and weakness. How many times have people wished CEOs actually knew what they were talking about? As long as Elon knows enough to build a decent team and lead it well, he doesn't need to know everything. From the outside it looks like he sees himself as 'one of the engineers' which is something I deeply respect, even if there's major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      Yeah, I appreciate any engineering firm that at least attempts to have some engineering leadership in charge. > major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones). That Vegas loop too... That's going to be a truly awful tunnel fire someday, and the safety systems there seem seriously lacking. (Also, the whole project feels like a grift.)
_coveredInBees 6y ago
I dunno, self-driving is an interesting computer-vision / machine-learning problem and it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on. For anyone working in the field, the end goal is extremely rewarding in terms of the long-term beneficial impact on society it would have and the numerous lives it would save. I don't think Tesla is going to drop FSD R&D anytime soon. They've also built out amazing software infrastructure under Karpathy's leadership to make use of their fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars to run shadow experiments with newer models in the background and continuously collect more difficult and interesting training data so they can improve their models and their internal test-sets for tracking metrics. They are also a relatively lean team from what I've heard, so it's not like they are bankrolling hundreds of very expensive ML PhDs at the moment. It is debatable if they (or anyone else) will "solve" FSD with current approaches, but I think the technology is already pretty fascinating and useful.
- shaan7 6y ago
  > it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    Yup double yup ! > numerous lives it would save If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.
    - XorNot 6y ago
      These are political problems, it's a different skillset.
    - logicchains 6y ago
      Globally around 1.3 million people are killed in motor accidents yearly and tens of millions more are permanently disabled (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...). In comparison there are around 0.4 million malaria deaths annually (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria). So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.
anonytrary 6y ago
TLDR: This technology is in its infancy but is very much so in the R&D phase. He needs to retain top scientists and avoid making promises. The research isn't there yet, which is why Elon should be trying to retain people who have deeply studied the hippocampus and brain. What the heck is he doing? Find the best people in this domain. The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. He needs more researchers in the fundamentals. I think if they've built the robot that inserts the electrodes non-invasively, they can continue to add additional electrodes and get an even more accurate measurement of what's happening elsewhere in the brain. This tech will takes years and years to master. Neuralink a science company. Or at least, it should be at this point if I'm taking it seriously. God knows there are hundreds of tech companies selling SAAS software for domains that have negligible research. Neuralink shouldn't be like that. Don't overpromise and underdeliver just yet, causing best people to leave. This company has tons of potential.
- f6v 6y ago
  > It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Not a neuroscientist, but it seems like the problem is more involved than just training a DL model on a data. We need detailed maps of the brain before we put any electrodes in it. Meanwhile, full mouse brain map is likely a decade away [0]. Humans have a bigger brain, imagine how long it’d take. It’s just a lot of manual labor which takes incredibly long time. Keep in mind that you also need to map thousands, if not millions of brains to model population heterogeneity. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > The potential is there with the electrode technology he's built. It's an AI problem now, to make sense of the data. Supervised learning mostly. You can measure what the brain does when certain things happen. This is an unproven hypothesis. Since we do not know how computation actually happens in the brain, we can't say for sure that electrical signals can be matched to the actual computations happening, even if they are correlated. It is still possible that the electrical signals we are measuring are just byproducts, and that the real compatation happens at a chemical level or inside each individual neuron or even in microtubules as Penrose believed. The nice part is that this means that neuralink's attempts could be extremely useful to our understanding of the brain even if they fail - it would actually be an amazing discovery if they could show that you CAN'T deduce the brain's intent from observing electrical activities. We do know for sure though that you can use electrical signals to interface with motor neurons, so at least improvements in prosthetics should be something that neuralink can realistically deliver.
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interactivecode 6y ago
Ever since I learned that Musk didn't found Tesla [0] or PayPal [1] I get really uncomfortable when reading news like this. It's clearly Musk doing another hostile take over of a company someone else started. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003–200... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history
- prestigious 6y ago
  I mean tesla without Elon is not really tesla. I never really thought he FOUNDED PayPal, but rather part of the so-called PayPal mafia that was successful at starting other companies. I never heard that he didn’t pull his weight from Peter thiel or the others
  - papito 6y ago
    I only wish I was slightly older during the dot com boom. I had to finish college and do it with flying colors, being from a poor family. If you had the means and some padding to take fairly reasonable risks, you walked away with riches. These people were at the right place and the right time, let's not lionize them as investment geniuses. They had money to put down on some horses, that is ALL.
    - wayoutthere 6y ago
      It was certainly no sure thing, and it’s easy to say that in hindsight. There were definitely a lot of people who walked away from the dot-com era with worthless stock options and wounded egos. Plenty of people ended up taking the “safe” route too and getting a job at IBM. We’re in the same place with crypto right now. People will look back and say “oh jeez if only”. The early bazillionaires are already minted but there are a lot of crypto millionaires made every day. It’s just a lot of people dumping their life savings into BTC/ETH and enjoying the ride.
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      That doesn’t line up with what I’ve read about that time period. A lot of the companies that were well funded by such bets went bankrupt. In all likelihood you would have lost money during the bust. The companies that weathered the storm were actually delivering good products and had cash flow. That takes a lot of work on the tech and business sides. Maybe you could have timed the bubble and exited with a pile of cash, who knows. If you want to make those kinds of bets you could make them right now.
ur-whale 6y ago
>but with neuroscience, it seems the research isn't there yet. The interesting aspect of your comment is in fact: what is the capital outlay and time needed for the science to actually get there. Elon has a track record of severely under-estimating those, but he is also smart enough (via PR / govt grants / leveraging past successes, etc ...) to stretch both beyond anything reasonable, to the point of actually reaching success (e.g. TESLA, SpaceX).
beyondarmonia 6y ago
I really wouldn't go far based on that list. It's mostly from the Waitbutwhy article from years ago when they were still basically a research/brainstorming group and hadn't even figured out what they wanted to do or what approach they wanted to take. For comparison to Musk's other companies , it's analogous to Bill Cantrell or Mike Griffin or that guy from sea launch at SpaceX. Some in this group were very briefly there like Tim Hanson. Some I think are misreported to not be there , unless anyone has any extra information. For example , Paul Merolla was there at the last conference , even though he's reported as not being with the company. Some I think are also advisors like Sabes , unless something has changed. One of them is just a neurosurgeon , but they already have a whole surgery department with a lead now.
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stunt 6y ago
Getting top talents or investing on top talents? He has the money and he has the guts to take big risks which is remarkable for an investor. I think any scientist with a "revolutionary" idea that requires lots of capital will proactively approach Elon Musk.
gmadsen 6y ago
Zoox is very much still doing self driving...

kumarvvr 6y ago

I wonder how much did ethical concerns contributed to that decision. I am conflicted about neural-link. On one hand, if successful, it will improve lives of many disabled persons. On the other hand, fiddling with nature in this manner has never been good for anyone involved. I mean, poking things into your brain to control external devices, does humanity really need such tech?

throwaway3699 6y ago
Imagine if you could record your memories and play them back to yourself or others. Consider having an entire generation of family memories accessible to those who have dementia/alzheimer's. This technology will be life changing, consumer applications aside.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  For any new technology it is important to ask, who will have access and how will we treat those without access. Sometimes new tech enriches all our lives, nearly everyone benefits from renewable energy for instance. In other cases you risk furthering the divide between haves and have nots. When a person experiencing homelessness has their neural device go bad, how do we ensure they aren't just left in the street suffering? Are we comfortable living in a world where the elderly are permitted to suffer from Alzheimer's when we have a cure like you describe, just because they were too poor to afford treatment? Secondly, it is important to ask, how could the technology be used if greed or maliciousness are the main motivators. Do those downsides outweigh the positives? I'm moderately bullish on brain computer interfaces, but I caution or challenge people to put on their engineering hats and really think deeply about both the positives and negatives of new technology.
  - rdedev 6y ago
    Isn't it already happening now ? Many people simply don't go to the doctor because of the associated costs. But this dosent mean we shouldnt do research into curing diseases. A better solution to the scenario you provided above would be a nationalised healthcare system, or atleast something close to it where people can get a basic amount of care without having to think about money

natch 6y ago

Having had some very minimal observation of Max up close at another venue, I was intrigued to see him in the position. Smart guy. Is it possible to be too self assured? One of his best attributes, having a bold disregard for limits most people set, in some ways did make him a great match for the initial phase imho. Not sure if speculation is frowned on here, but let me label this clearly as speculation: I’m guessing the company is ready in the next phase to have a CEO who is more of a cultural fit with the medical community. Meaning a little more of a conventional, conservative (not in the politics sense), mild person. Max is a bit more of a take charge and get it done type, not a soothing type. Again though this is based on very little anecdata.

yayr 6y ago

I am not sure, that the interface tech with brain invasion is the best route going forward in the space. There is work on non-invasive alternatives, that promise sooner results for some use cases, e.g. https://www.mindportal.com https://www.mindportal.com

phito 6y ago
Sounds interesting but the website doesn't talk at all about how it is done. I'm left wondering if they have something or are just doing research?

hellothere1337 6y ago

Hopefully it's a brief respite. The day we manage to create a brain interface is the day when the privacy of our own thoughts will begin to fade.

ramraj07 6y ago
You could always choose not to put an Alexa in a brain? Why stop people from doing what they want to with their bodies?
- kakkan 6y ago
  You can always choose to not use a phone or the internet? The difference is that life becomes hard when you wanna opt out of a mainstream technology that we fully do not understand.
  - hellothere1337 6y ago
    Indeed if you want to make a living opting out of certain technologies is impossible despite their invasive effects. Imagine competing with a programmer than can solve leetcode / code an entire system in a few seconds using such a brain interface. It would be somewhat difficult to attain that kind of productivity with old I/O devices
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    This might be true but if something is possible, made acceptable by the majority (even if it’s detrimental to them in the long term), and is capitalizable for commercial gain I doubt you or anyone can stop it from happening. Technology will progress to places wherever it can, the only way to at least slow it is to make it illegal.

admissionsguy 6y ago

I have no idea if the same is the case in here, but Musk had to purge the senior leadership of both Tesla and SpaceX (and multiple times at that, I believe?) in order to achieve the innovation velocity he aimed for. On each occasion the press called a setback what amounted to losing deadweight, people too invested in legacy ways of doing things, and the companies went on to far surpass the most optimistic expectations.

vmception 6y ago
I mostly agree but primarily because departures are inherently non-news. I acknowledge that there is little transparency in the private sector (I'm not suggesting that there should be) and for companies of public interest the public must grasp at straws, such as departures. I can also acknowledge that executive and governance "challenges" can have a high correlation with corporate distress, but it's probably not much different than the general distribution of companies. People's expectations of what other's careers should look like is warped. I think mostly because people wish they were founders or valued personnel for a project they would get married to. But there is little utility in being married to a forever project, they should appreciate the utility that was provided for the time it was relevant.
aero-glide2 6y ago
Can you tell more about the SpaceX purge?
- beyondarmonia 6y ago
  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-insight-idUKKCN1N50FC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-insight-i...
ObserverNeutral 6y ago
> far surpass the most optimistic expectations. Both companies are leechers for government money, that's all they do. The best product from Tesla is the hype they sell to public officials to take government money and the hype they sell to retail investors to take their money to pump the stock. People compare it to Amazon, they are not even in the same league, not the same ballpark

Tepix 6y ago

One of the goals of Neuralink is increasing the bandwidth between the brain and a computer. What if a brain is just inherently slow when transmitting? Apparently all languages average 39 bits transmission rate. Perhaps that's because its how fast we can collect our thoughts? https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-hav...

vmception 6y ago
> What if a brain is just inherently slow when transmitting? I don't get that impression. That's the entire counterpoint. Maybe others can elaborate. Language is the slow bus.
- adampk 6y ago
  User Illusion made the point that your consciousness can only ingest 40 bits/s. So the reason language is "slow" is because there is no reason to deliver information at a higher rate than people can ingest it. https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-Penguin/dp/0140230122 https://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-P...
HeadHonchoSP 6y ago
Language is abstract of brain function. Neurons fire electrical signals in milliseconds some cases even faster, words come second as a result of the firing. I'd think that neuralink is trying to figure out right now what fires where and at what time in the brain to effectively capture and transfer it into bits imho.
slfnflctd 6y ago
I go back and forth on this myself. To some extent, I expect it involves the whole 'thinking fast and slow' set of tradeoffs. However, there are states of mind I've both read about and experienced, where it seems like you can fit a much more complete, rapid and specific understanding of a complex situation's interconnections in thought than you can get across in the bandwidth of speech. This is part of why we invented slide shows, haha. But in all seriousness, one of the more interesting outcomes here could be the ability to 'project' a complex thought/feeling experience in a way that speeds up the propagation of knowledge & understanding. Something like this could revolutionize everything from education to mental health. It's super uncertain if we'll ever achieve that, but we could learn some useful things on the way. For me, the biggest questions are, can we significantly speed up the learning process, what types of learning work best or worst, and how can we use this to better understand the brain? If you haven't seen it yet, here [https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html] is an extremely long, cartoon-filled, fanboy description of Neuralink's potential which somewhat discusses these ideas and a lot more.

jaimex2 6y ago

Wasnt working hard enough to meet Musks standards.

leesec 6y ago

I feel like I read this same article about Starlink's program early on, swapping out a big chunk of core players. Seemed to work out for them.

tediousdemise 6y ago

I don't really blame anyone for leaving one of Elon Musk's portfolio of companies. Reviews of Muskian company culture on sites like Reddit and Glassdoor make it seem like a very poor work-life balance. You must be over-enthusiastic about the product and willing to work brutal overtime hours for little more than a market rate engineering salary. Hard pass.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> You must be over-enthusiastic about the product and willing to work brutal overtime hours for little more than a market rate engineering salary. That sums it up. These environments can produce a lot faster, but they require a steady stream of new hires to replace all of the departures. Most hires know what they’re getting into. Spending a few years at a Musk company is a career boost, and they know it. Once you’ve had the resume boost it’s easy to pivot into another company as “the person who worked with Elon” where you can get paid more and work less.
- boringg 6y ago
  It's rebranding the consultant model but instead of working for clients you work on products. Churn and burn. And instead of just hired guns you work on a real world problem that you hopefully believe.

40four 6y ago

I'm not sure why this really matters? As someone who is personally indifferent to Elon, this is not very interesting. To Elon detractors and people who want to see him fail, it just seems like an opportunity to 'dunk' on him in the media. People come and go from companies for various reasons, doesn't mean they are doomed. I'm not an expert on Neuralink, but the little bit I've seen from them it seems like they are in very early exploratory stages. I imagine this is an area of science that's very well understood. So they are likely blazing a path into uncharted territory. If the least they do is make meaningful contributions or discoveries in this field, I still think that's pretty awesome. As far as delivering a product? I'm not aware that they've promised anything as far as that. Sure like most Musk companies they talk big game and throw around lofty concepts, but that's always been their strategy to churn up interest in the media. Presumably they intent to start out with some type of device to assist paralyzed folks interact with computers/ phones. If they do achieve this, that would be remarkable. But this is realistically still what, just a guess, 3-5 years away?

disabled 6y ago
It is because Musk is making claims that are not technically possible, and may never be technically possible. Experts have warned him against making these claims, but he is in contempt of them. So, it is no wonder why people are leaving. Knowing how Silicon Valley operates, it would be likely that he would copy somebody's groundbreaking research (without giving proper credit) and make a few changes (to commercialize it, with gimmicky features) and have his claim to fame.
- mpfundstein 6y ago
  'may never' and here u got it.
- johncoogan 6y ago
  By "never be technically possible" do you mean: Not possible in the usual 10 year timeframe we consider for Silicon Valley type companies. Or Never in a million years, completely violates the laws of physics.
- 6y ago

sentinel 6y ago

> Elon Musk's firm has yet to ship a product. The article starts out strong lol. No bias here.

wyxuan 6y ago

I think that Facebook with their acquisition of Ctrl labs are further ahead than most people think I’in HCI and might even be ahead of neurallink, especially as Facebook has significantly more money behind their effort.

theontheone 6y ago
Yeah CTRL labs has been flying under the radar, but they have a ton of top talent and already demonstrated insane results. I will go further to say they are easily ahead of neuralink in terms of bringing a faster-bandwidth interface; of course, for more ambitious projects that Musk has tweeted about like mental health disorders, you must go through the brain, but there's no indication the neuralink approach will scale to this either.

mjgs 6y ago

I wonder if they’ll release some of the code open source. It would be cool to see some of this early brain chip code.

londons_explore 6y ago
I'm not so interested in the code - unless I have a very expensive custom silicon fab, I probably can't create my own version. I would like to see them doing extensive data dumps of the data their hardware collects from the brains. That seems like an obvious thing to do, since the likely outcome is researchers will find new ways to analyze and use the data. Obviously with human subjects there could be severe privacy implications (you might be literally publishing your inner thoughts, even though nobody knows how to analyze them yet). But for animals this should be fine.