Neuralink
Neuralink Corp. is an American neurotechnology company that has developed, as of 2024, implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). It was founded by Elon Musk and a team of eight scientists and engineers. Neuralink was launched in 2016 and first publicly reported in March 2017.
The company is based in Fremont, California, with plans to build a three-story building with office and manufacturing space near Austin, Texas, in Del Valle, about 10 miles east of Gigafactory Texas, Tesla's headquarters and manufacturing plant that opened in 2022.
Since its founding, the company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities. By 2019, it had received $158 million in funding ($100 million was from Musk) and had 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width) threads into the brain, and demonstrated a system that reads information from a lab rat via 1,500 electrodes. It anticipated starting experiments with humans in 2020, but later moved that to 2023. As of May 2023, it has been approved for human trials in the United States. On January 29, 2024, Musk announced that Neuralink had successfully implanted a Neuralink device in a human and that the patient was recovering.
The company has faced criticism for the large number of primates that were euthanized after medical trials. Veterinary records of the monkeys showed complications with surgically implanted electrodes. Experts have raised concerns that Neuralink flouts scientific and ethical norms, raises questions about patient safety and risks setting back the entire field of neurotechnology.
In September 2024, the company announced that its latest development effort, Blindsight, would enable blind people whose visual cortex is undamaged to regain some level of vision. The development received "breakthrough" status from the U.S. federal government, which will accelerate development.
The Remixes
- 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000000Z
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