Elon Musk’s start-up will test its brain implants on humans

2023-05-26 02:59:25

The start-up Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s companies, announced Thursday, May 25 on Twitter that it had received the agreement of the American health authorities to test its connected brain implants on humans.

“This is an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people”said the Californian company on its Twitter account, specifying that “recruitment for clinical trials is not yet open”.

Neuralink designs connected devices to be implanted in the brain to communicate with computers directly through thought. They must first be used to help people who are paralyzed or suffering from neurological diseases. The start-up then wants to make these implants safe and reliable enough for them to be elective (comfort) surgery: people could then pay a few thousand dollars to equip their brain with computer power.

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For Elon Musk, these chips must allow humanity to arrive at a “symbiosis with artificial intelligence (AI)”in his 2020 words, delivered at the company’s annual conference.

The billionaire fears that AI systems will overtake humans and one day take control. In March, he founded X.AI, a new AI company, likely to compete with OpenAI, the company that designed ChatGPT, a successful generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and to produce all kinds of texts on demand.

“We are now confident that Neuralink’s device is ready for humans, so the timeline depends on the FDA approval process”the American drug agency, he had indicated at the end of November on Twitter, a month after having bought the social network.

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The boss of Tesla and SpaceX (space exploration) is used to risky predictions, especially about the autonomy of Tesla electric cars. In July 2019, he estimated that Neuralink could perform its first tests on individuals in 2020.

So far, prototypes the size of a small coin have been implanted in the skulls of animals. Many monkeys are thus able to ” play “ to video games or « taper » words on a screen, simply by following the movement of the cursor on the screen.

At the end of November, the start-up also took stock of its latest advances in the design of a robot-surgeon and the development of other implants, to be installed in the spinal cord or the eyes, to restore mobility or vision. .