I love that one of the first things he said he did was binge on Civilization 6 until 6am. Welcome back, buddy!
Strangely that simple example was the most powerful part for me. I've done that so many times and it was such a fun experience. Now he gets to re-live that joy (and follow up shame) again!
Some clarity for ppl. - Other techniques would likely work for this patient. Eyegaze technology is pretty readily available. He has proximity switches for driving his chair and lets not forget voice control. So.. what does BCIe offer significantly? I think this is the BIG problem BCI has. The gains are not enough for a lot of people compared to what the AT sector can already offer. Please remember this. This guy could use eyegaze or voice control on pretty regular hardware. And no surgery needed..
- These types of BCI are effectively an array of switches. You typically map a motor thought eg. "Move your arm up" => Moving the cursor up. This maybe how then you control a game such as chess if it has keyboard shortcuts. Eye movement could be done in the same way but there are easier ways. Interestingly to measure these motor commands you dont really need intracortical BCI. You can do it with surface EEG. Sticking it inside your head - closer to centres where you can measure intentional thought makes the signal cleaner and more reliable
- The big breakthroughs is really making this intracortical stuff safer and long term. Its getting there. But this isnt it
The big wins out there - are in speech BCI. Thats hardcore. Even the two main studies doing this - each of the participants requires a LOT of training time to make a Machine model work efficiently.
I haven't followed Neuralink too closely since it was announced, so I was not expecting to see what I just saw. I've seen a handful of breakthrough moments in my life - I think this will be remembered as one.
From a technical perspective, moving a mouse with your mind isn't entirely new: https://elifesciences.org/articles/18554
Personally, I think the most exciting part of Neuralink and other companies working on BCIs is the fact that they're trying to keep these implants in long-term, and scale the deployment significantly. Most academic BCI research thus far has just been trials, without patients getting to keep the implants long term.
> "I played Civ 6 until 6AM"
Neuralink has now achieved product market fit
A key differentiator of Neuralink is that the implant can both read and write through ~1000 channels (each of which is a tiny wire into the brain). So it's not really the same thing as external devices that read electrical activity from outside the brain, because those cannot write data. Not sure if the initial implant supports much of this, obviously you'd start with the simplest use cases.
That's pretty amazing, the fact he's able to click the pause button with his brain alone is insane to me - that's like Apple Vision Pro without the gigantic goggles.
The sheer joy on this mans face to be able to freely control a mouse again, and engage with general technology. If they’re able to make this into a generally safe procedure, a lot of people will be interested in just that.
As soon as you can stimulate tactile impressions it's over. You can put on your VR Headset and be in a completely different world. Eventually the interface for eyes and ears will improve, but tactility would be a huge step towards being in a completely virtual world.
The inspiration for this (as well as for SpaceX) comes from the “Culture” series of novels by Iain M. Banks, which most people are apparently unfamiliar with. Specifically the BCI interface is called “neural lace” there and it grows along with the brain from a seed and covers its entire surface. There it serves as an interface to access superhuman AIs and information in general, on demand, and only the hopeless luddites choose not to have it
I'm curious if he's signed any type of NDA or non-disparagement agreement to receive the implant.
I'd like to know if they're doing 'online training' - ie. Do the weights of the neural net which converts raw signal data into mouse movements update themselves every few seconds using historical data?
Such online training might be necessary to deal with brain plasticity - ie. The optimal set of neurons to read to determine X/Y mouse movement right now might not be the same set it was an hour ago.
Such plasticity can be seen in regular humans too when they say 'whoa, I haven't used a pen for months - let me get used to writing again!'.
Good thing no Musk owned companies have a well established track record of faking the entire thing
I want to know how big the GPU crunching all the numbers is to make this work...
The mouse seems to move very nicely and smoothly (60 FPS?) which presumably means the neural net which converts raw sensor data to mouse movements is running in ~15 milliseconds.
Most neural nets don't do a forward pass in 15ms unless they're either tiny or the GPU is very powerful.
Every possible breakthrough is now a demo on Twitter without much technical context.
Oh my fauci! I can't wait to get ads served directly into my brain
This video kinda looks like the patient really likes their new implant and it's abilities, but is pretty frustrated they now need to do more trials/make marketing videos for the implant when they just want to get on with their life...
Almost out of the loop about Neuralink's tech. Is it EEG?
Is it EEG? or any other tech?
Musk says "Blindsight is the next @Neuralink product after Telepathy."
Let's see, I think after that, the next product should be Magic Missle. Or maybe Sanctuary?
I’ll believe this when it’s independently verified.
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It is fascinating. But looking at this guy condition, playing games would be IMHO not the prio. I would hook up the remote controlling to a robotic exoskeleton, for just be back and function normal. I guess that also can be detected ( intention to move feet or hands in any direction ).
But let's see, we are really at the beginning.
This makes me very excited! I have Spinal Muscular Atrophy type 2 [1] and I have lost most of my physical capabilities save for 2-3 fingers and of course speech. Although I am now on Nusinersen [2] treatments I am still becoming weaker over time, albeit extremely slowly.
It brings me comfort to know that such a fallback will eventually exist, should I need one.
Note that specialists are saying that another promising drug from Scholar Rock [3] would probably prevent any further weakening if used in conjunction with my current treatment. Unfortunately, the FDA takes a long time to approve new medications and I have heard this one is particularly special because there is potential for abuse by athletes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinal_muscular_atrophy
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nusinersen
[3]: https://scholarrock.com/our-pipeline/spinal-muscular-atrophy...