Livestreamed progress update on Elon Musk’s Neuralink

In addition to Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk is also running Neuralink, a company working on developing high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces. In layman’s terms, he’s making a device that implants into the brain to theoretically help with things like paralysis and blindness. It’s been a bit of mystery so far, but yesterday Neuralink had a live demo of where they’re currently at.

If you don’t feel like watching the entire hour, the most interesting things happen at at 15:35 where they demo detecting the neurons firing when a pig sniffs something with its snout, and at 18:20 where the Neuralink is predicting where the limbs of a pig will be based on the neuron readings. Assuming they aren’t cheating their demo, the results are pretty impressive considering they aren’t even at version 1.0 yet. And kudos to the first lunatic to actually purchase and get this thing implanted. Sure, it doesn’t appear to kill a pig, but best of luck letting the guy who named his kid X Æ A-12 put a machine in your brain.

Keep going for yesterday’s full livestream of the Neuralink progress update.