The monkey orders room service. I'm not even kidding. Yeah, it won't be all that long before someone with a neural link device can communicate faster than someone who has a fully functional body. And the goal is to give people superpowers. We just want to be clear. There's only one person with a Neuralink chip in their brain. So for people out there who think we've put a chip in their brain, we'd like to assure you, for what it's worth, you probably won't believe us. We did not put each of in your brain. Okay. Welcome to Neuralink live update. Were going to tell you about the progress of the first patient with Neuralink. And sort of recap of the progress there. Then talk about what changes we're making for the second patient, which we're hoping to do an implant in the next week or so. And this is for our first product, which is called telepathy, which enables you to control a computer or a phone just by thinking. So let's in fact. So we'll start off with just some introductions. DJ, you want to start? Hi, everyone. My name is DJ Saul. I'm an electrical engineer and a chip designer By training. I led the design of first several generations of the neuralink implant. Currently I was on the founding team and currently a president. I'm Matthew McDougall. I'm a practicing neurosurgeon and head of neurosurgery at Neuralink. Yeah go ahead. I'm Nina Bhakshan, head of brain interfaces, applications. And I'm Bliss. I'm a software engineer at Neuralink, trying to figure out how to turn brain activity into cool stuff. All right, thank you. Well, let's see. So we'll just get going into the presentation. So our first product is something we call telepathy, which enables the person with the neural link implant to control their phone or computer just by thinking. And once you can control your phone or computer, you can essentially control almost anything literally just by thinking. So there's no eye tracking or anything. It is purely your thoughts. So this is really quite a profound device that can help a lot of people who have lost the connection between their brain and body. So imagine people like Stephen Hawking, who imagine if he could communicate at the same speed as someone who still had the connection to their brain and body. So it's really something that can help millions of people around the world and it's part of our overall goal of enabling a very high bandwidth connection between the brain and, and your, and the rest of the world and your computers. The long term goal, which sounds a little esoteric, is to mitigate the civilizational risk of AI by having a sort of closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence. But that'll take many years. Along the way, we're going to help solve a lot of brain injury or spinal injury issues. So without first product telepathy, that's going to be really quite profound. There is also potential long term for bridging the gaps, or if there are damaged or severed neurons, being able to span the gap between the brain's motor cortex to the spine to enable someone to use their body. Again, I think that would be very exciting. And it's, you know, that is something that is possible in the long term. And then our second product, which we've demonstrated to work with monkeys is blindside, which would enable someone who is completely blind, lost both eyes, or completely lost their optic nerve to be able to see. So that's something that we hope to demonstrate in the future. So this just gives you a sense of what the device is. A way to think about. The neuralink device is kind of like a fitbit or an Apple Watch with tiny wires or electrodes. Those tiny wires are implanted in the brain and they read and write electrical signals. So a lot of people think the brain is this incredibly mysterious thing. It is mysterious in a lot of ways, but it does operate with electrical signals. So if you can read and write those electrical signals you can interface with the brain. And the device is sized so that it is the same size as the piece of skull that is removed. If it's like a few centimeters diameter of skull that's removed, we replace that with the device after implanting the tiny wires with the surgical robot. And that enables read write capability to the neurons. Completely wirelessly? Yes, exactly. Its completely wirelessly. So, like, I could have a Neuralink right now, you wouldn't know. And it charges inductively. So you could just basically have electromagnetic pad that you charge the device with. So, yeah, it's like an apple watch Exactly. So except that it's actually a. Much harder technical challenge to solve, given that there's limit as to how much heat the brain tissue, whereas in for phones and have a hot water if it's sitting on a table. Sure. Yeah So it's got to go through skin and stuff as well, in our case. So it is a tougher challenge to charge and to have eye bandwidth communications, given that it's got to go through skin in hair and stuff. We have solved it, but we have solved yeah. So our first. Step with the telepathy is basically to unlock digital independence for people with paralysis and to allow them control the computer just with their mind, without moving their body. And our goal is to provide them the same level of control functionality and reliability that I have when I'm using a computer. Even better than the level of control I have. It's not for you, actually, just to be clear, this guy controlling this with his brain, so he's not like, you can't see his hands in this video, but he's not using a mouse and keyboard. Just thinking about how to move the cursor and playing civilization. No eye tracker. Right? There's no eye tracking from He's live streaming. Just thinking, that's it. Just a couple days cursor move here. Yeah, yeah. This is like last night or two nights ago. Yeah, yeah. I think. I think the way he also described it is, yeah. He has many more videos on his platform. Definitely check them out. Yeah So he can. He's streaming that live and also can talk and, like, move his head without. Yeah. You guys, like, if you join this livestream, you can ask him questions. He'll tell you all about what it's like to move. Also, I think I haven't played civilization myself but I think this is actually not easy mode. This is expert mode. This is emperor mode. Emperor mode. If you have played civ, Emperor mode is like the highest difficult. The point is, this is a cognitively demanding task while live streaming, playing the hardest mode of game. And he's able to do that. While moving, talking, engaging with the audience. One of the other games he likes to play a lot is chess. I think it gets lost sometimes that he's actually playing speed chess against me. Yeah. Which requires an incredibly high fidelity degree of control and speed of control in order to be able to win. Also, another cool stuff about our device is that you can use it anywhere, anytime, also on a plane, during a flight while creating really cool memes of camera. Also, our device unlocks things that previously were impossible for our participants. For example we were able to connect him to his gaming consoles, which the mario cut with friends and family, and it was lovely to see them playing together after years. But he couldn't do it since he's injured. Imagine if you're sitting over from the sky, look over, he's making a cat meme. Not No hands, no movement. Yeah. Living a real world. Yeah. It's strange time. Yeah. And he loves using the device and using independently daily to watch videos and read play games using the browser. And the key metrics that we care is to make sure our device is actually useful, is to, is basically the amount of hours. We use the device daily and weekly, and we track it weekly since the surgery and on weeks that. He's not too busy and not traveling. He can even reach 70 hours of using the device a week. This is amazing. He would, of course, love to use it more, but need to run research sessions. He needs to sleep sometimes, and also, of course, to charge the device once in a while. Hopefully, we'll improve that over time. Maybe not obvious to people who are watching this. It's a normal MacBook. He's controlling. This isn't some limited addition thing where there's only a few options, like, you can just do anything that you can do on MacBook Pro. Same one I have on my desk. Actually, it's the exact same one. And maybe another interesting point is that on the first day he used BCI brain control, he was able to break the previous world record for cursor control just by using the brain. And recently he even doubled it and was able to outperform about 10% of our engineered neuralink. And you can be sure that we are very good in this game and very quick. And if you want to check out how well you can do it, you can do it on our website. And it's very addictive games. Yeah, it's a very simple game. You just have to click on the square. But it's actually, even though it sounds silly, it's quite a. Yeah, it can be quite. It sounds like it can be quite addictive, and it's. Especially if you get a low score and you think, there's no way. I got it. So, I mean, anyone who wants to try this, I recommend going to the neuralink.com website and seeing if you can beat Nolan's record, and you will find that it's actually quite difficult to do. So and this is really with version one of the device, and with only a small percentage of the electrodes that are working. So this is really just the beginning. But even the beginning is twice as good as the world record. This is important to emphasize. The media has a habit of. Of saying that the glass is 10% empty, but actually it's 90% full. So I think it's really quite an accomplishment of the neuralink team to have achieved with the first patient, the first device twice the world record for the brain to computer bandwidth. That's really an astonishing an amazingly great outcome, and it's only going to get better from here. So the potential is to ultimately get, I think, to megabit level. So that's. That's part of the long term goal. Of improving the bandwidth of the brain computer interface. If you think about, like, how low the bandwidth normally is between a human and a device, The average bandwidth is extremely low. It's, I'd say, less than one bit per second over the course of a day. If there are 86,400 seconds in a day you're outputting less than that number of bits to any given device, except in perhaps very rare circumstances. So This is actually quite important for AI, basically for human AI symbiosis is just being able to communicate at a speed the AI could follow. So, yeah, just to emphasize, again, performing at this extremely high level with about 15% of his channels functional. And so we want to mitigate. Any of the problems that led to that situation. So, you know, the brain is a fascinating organ. Share with you some of the secrets about the brain. During any typical brain surgery, a Small amount of air is introduced into the skull. Thats because neurosurgeons like to have. As much room as possible around the brain. And so there's this little known control mechanism of allowing the CO2. Concentration in the blood to rise a bit which allows the brain to. Either expand or contract, depending on where You target that CO2. But typically, neurosurgeons will have the brain shrink by lowering CO2. What we're going to do in our future surgeries is keep the CO2 concentration actually quite normal, maybe even slightly elevated. And that'll allow the brain to stay its normal size and shape during surgery. That should eliminate this air pocket that. We saw in the first participant. That air pocket, we think may have Contributed to eating up some of the thread slack as the air bubble. Migrated to be under the implant, pushed The brain away from the implant, and so that's easy enough to fix. Another consideration that we want to focus on for our upcoming participants is that the brain, think of it like a really complex folded onion. It's layer upon layer of sheets of neurons all over the surface of the brain, folded into this odd looking shape. The folds of the brain travel down. Deep into the brain, and along with it go those onion layers of neurons. And if we insert very close to one of the folds, where there may be very useful information encoded in neurons, we may end up traveling with our threads parallel to some of the layers of neurons that we're most interested in, avoiding them entirely to avoid that possibility, we're going to insert in our future participants more close to the middle of the apex of the folds ensuring that we'Re crossing the layers of interest, layer five of the cortex. I also think that it's important to highlight here those tiny wires that Elon mentioned. They're fraction of a human hair. They're very flexible intentionally so, because brain's constantly moving, and you want the electrodes Be moving with the brain, causing less of the scarring. And it's actually impossible for a human neurosurgeon, however talented Matthew is to actually maneuver them. So we have a surgical robot that we built that can actually precisely target them in any three dimensional space, x, y, z as well as with micron level precision while avoiding vasculature so that you don't disrupt and cause immune response from happening. We actually have the technology to be able to place them exactly where we want them in 3d. Yeah. It was truly amazing to see the surface of the brain after the robot had inserted all the electrodes on the first participant without a drop of blood in sight. Is really quite an achievement. Yes. Something that probably most people don't realize is that the brain appears to be somewhat undifferentiated. If you look at the cortex, it looks like a whole bunch of folds that were maybe, like. It's not obvious just looking at it, say, a picture of the brain that the brain is highly differentiated, that there's. You pretty much know exactly where the part of the brain is that controls your right hand and your left hand and your leg and that kind of thing, or vision. It's actually quite precisely located. It's not some people might think look at the brain like, oh, could be. It could be anywhere. But actually, Your brain is highly differentiated, even though it doesn't look. It's usually. Yeah. Do you want to describe how we actually wear, like, how we identify where to drill the queen? Yeah. So we can. We can put a patient that is considering this implant into an fMRI, so, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, and ask them to imagine hand movements that, because of the spinal cord injury, don't happen. But just imagining those hand movements causes these areas of the brain to light up. In the fMRI scanner, we have a pretty good idea based, in fact for each individual participant, which part of their brain is going to respond to imagined movements of the hand. And so we can map those imagined movements, much as we all do when moving a mouse to controlling a cursor on a screen, even without the use of a mouse. Yeah. But anyway, I think this is kind of an important point, that it's not like the part of your brain that controls your hand might be anywhere in the cortex. This is not the case. It's going to be in a very specific region, and it's going to be extremely common across people. Precision is key, yeah. The left handed. Right handed thing blew my mind, too. Like, if you're right handed, you want the device on the left side? Yeah. The lateral side. Yeah. The left side of your brain controls right side of your brain. Yeah. Everything's cranked. Yeah. Another of the risk mitigations we're looking at in the future. Is that. You know, the implant has a certain size. The depth of the bottom of the implant is actually thinner than the average human skull. And so what we want to be able to do is control the size of the gap under the implant, give the threads that travel from the implant into the brain as much slack as possible. We didn't do this in the first participant because we didn't want to manipulate any of their tissue that we didn't absolutely have to. In upcoming implants, our plan is to sculpt the surface of the skull very intentionally to minimize the gap under the implant such that the bottom of the implant travels perfectly flush with the normal contour of the inner side of the skull. That will put the implant closer to the brain. It'll eliminate some of the tension on the threads. We think it will reduce some of the tendency of threads to retract. And we actually built a tool to do right. Yeah, this is actually, this is a very important detail. You really want the inner contour of the skull to be flush so that the implant, the brain doesn't want to pucker up into the gap. That's really quite a big deal. minimizing the air pocket and the implant being flush with the inside contour of the skull are two very important improvements. The additional benefit here is that you do see some amount of stick up, what we call stick up. Minor bump in the head, but this actually eliminates that even further. Yeah, I mean, really, our goal is that if you run your hand over the top of the skull, you don't feel any bump, you don't feel any device. And that even if someone was bald, you wouldn't really even notice it. And then from the inner contour of the skull, the brain, from a physical standpoint, doesn't really notice that there's a divot in the skull because there's no divot. Okay. Another aspect of the human brain that obviously differs from any of the animals that we tested in is that the human brain is a lot bigger. And so you may not realize that that means the human brain moves quite a bit more than any of these other smaller brained creatures. When we open the skull we see the brain travel toward and away from the robot about 3 mm in total as the heart beats and the breathing takes place. And so that movement it adds a small challenge for the robot in precisely choosing a depth to insert each thread. It's not an enormous challenge, and we've already upgraded the robot's capabilities to be able to even more precisely target depth in even a very rapidly moving brain with a high amplitude of movement you may think the most obvious mitigation for threads that pulled out of the brain is to insert them deeper. We think so, too. And so we're going to broaden the range of depths at which we insert threads. So, for the very first participant, we had an enormous amount of data from our animal work, and we had very highly optimized our insertion depth to maximize the crossing of layers of interest in the cortex with the electrodes that we're recording from. Now that we know retraction is a possibility, we're going to insert at a variety of depths that even in several cases of differing amounts of retracting threads, we're going to have electrodes at the proper depth and with the deepest threads, be able to track how much retraction has occurred across the surface of the brain from each thread. And so we're going to both have more threads in the right layer and have better data on how much retraction has occurred. If you're a BCI nerd, you might know that being able to control individual z depth per thread is not something that most neural interface devices offer. Most neural interface devices are kind of a static, fixed, rigid array that you push in and all the electrodes are at one depth. To be able to do this is actually pretty, pretty novel. Part of the robot. Yeah. The historical approach is to actually pound in a sort of bed of nails with an air hammer into the brain. It looks crazy, that is. Yeah. Just with it, with a pneumatic hammer. It sounds somewhat barbaric. This is not what we do, but this is what's been done before is literally just hammering in what looks like a better nails into the brain, which actually works. It's astonishing that it actually works at all. Some people like Manual, like DBS probes, you're just sticking in by hand, neurosurgeons, just guiding them in. Those are several orders of magnitude more volume of brain tissue that you're destroying compared to what we're doing. But that deep brain stimulation stuff does actually work, and it actually helps people a lot. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great product. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think we'll be able to do a much more finessed version of that down the road. So I mean, it's really difficult. Like, the Neuralink device is something that really absolutely minimizes damage to the brain, absolutely minimizes the load on the patient. And the goal is to allow someone to live a completely normal life. You won't even notice that someone even has the device. So like I said, restoring the ability to control your computer and phone. That's how telepathy and then next device being able to allow people to see that could not see before. And in fact, you could allow people to see kind of like Dordale Laforge in Star Trek. In any, whatever. Infrared. Yeah, infrared, ultraviolet. Radar So I think another way of saying it is that we want to give people superpowers. So it's not just that we're restoring your prior brain functionality, but that you actually have functionality far greater than a normal human. That's a super big deal. And I also think oftentimes the questions that we get a lot is why do you have to actually go into the brain? What if you place it on the surface or outside the skull? Basically, the long story short, the physics of how it works, you really need to get the sensors, which are these facing in the brain, next to the source, which neuron as close to it as possible. Otherwise, what you get is you get a population response and not be able to kind of do the level of controls that we believe. Yeah, I mean, maybe a good sort of analogy would be like, if you're trying to understand what goes on in a factory, you kind of need to go into the factory. You can't just put a stethoscope on the wall. And try to figure out what's going. Like anything on the outside of the Try to read things from the outside is like putting a stethoscope on the wall of a factory, trying to understand what's going in the factory. It's not going to be effective. You got to be. Threads have got to be in there. So but I just want to emphasize again, like, the goal is to give people superpowers not. Not just to restore prior functionality. So that's very exciting. And I think that should give hope to a lot of people in the world that the future is going to be exciting and inspiring and the technology is going to give them superpowers. I mean, that's amazing. Can you multitask with it? Yeah. In fact, you look at Nolan's streaming, and you can just check out Nolan's streams on the x platform. He's multitasking all the time, so he's playing video games while talking and. Listening to podcasts. Listening to podcasts, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's really just like if you're using your hands and you can be playing a video game while talking. So, I mean, don't take our word for it. Just go watch. Yeah, he's out there on the Internet doing his thing. Yeah, exactly. So can you do keyboard shortcuts or is it just the mouse? Yeah, that's actually what we're working on right now. Sure. So currently he's walking the mouse, but we are also exploring the coding. More dimensions from the neural activity. Multiple clicks. So to shortcuts or just able to control more games. Control games with an Xbox controller. But also in the future, we plan to expand to decode text. Not just the mouse control, but also allow our participant to type much faster. Yeah, actually. So maybe going back to the discussion of thread retraction, you know, one of the very exciting parts to me about this story is that we're able to do so much with 15% of channels, and you have more channels. What that actually offers you is not just faster mouse control, because in the motor cortex, neurons don't all represent the same thing. So if you're trying to understand, like you know, what an individual finger is trying to do, you might or might not have an electrical next to it. And the more channels you have in the brain, the higher likelihood you have representation or decodability of all fingers on the hand. If you're trying to do something like output text at a fast rate, just something that matters a lot for people who are completely locked in, who cannot speak at all, who are trying to just say I love you to a loved one in your family, or ask for a glass of water or scratch or whatever, being able to type at a fast rate is extremely important. And the more fingers you have access to, higher probability, you can do that efficiently. And so, yeah, I'm super excited about how high the ceiling is that we can get to as we solve this action issue. Yeah, we're currently at approximately ten bits per second peak rate, but ultimately we want to get to a megabit and I think ultimately whole brain interface. I think many years from now, I think gigabit level is possible. Thats pretty astonishing. Now this is still version 1 of our device. As we mentioned, it's version 1 with only 15% of the threads working. The current device has 64 threads with 16 electrodes on each thread. Our next device has 128 threads with eight electrodes per thread. Because as we get more confident about how, where exactly to place the electrode, the thread, you need fewer electrodes per thread. So we can essentially, without substantial changes, potentially double the bandwidth if we are accurate with the placement of the threads. And then our next generation device will have maybe even more channels. Yeah, So next device, we're aiming for 3000 channels. This will just keep getting better and better really moving up, I think, in orders of magnitude, in factors of ten, basically. In what kind of bandwidth? So I think it won't be, it won't be all that long before someone with a neural link device can communicate faster than someone who has a fully functional body and, yeah, so I think faster than the fastest speed typist or auctioneer the esports tournaments are going to be, you won't be able to speak faster than someone can communicate with Neuralinked telepathy device. It may be a very interesting part of this. Basically, we currently connect standard inputs to the computer through mouse and keyboards. But very soon as we will have a bandwidth, we need to think about new ways to actually build the interface for devices. Yeah, no, that's a good point. Because the current input devices are centered around human hands. So it's like we've got these little meat sticks that we move, and there's a certain rate at which you can move your fingers. And so we've got the mouse and the keyboard and xbox controller or something like that You don't need that. You can actually since you're no longer, if you're not trying to use your hands, you actually don't need those conventional control mechanisms. And so ultimately, I think you'll be able to do conceptual telepathy, where you can communicate entire concepts uncompressed, to someone else with a neural link or to the computer. Even today, we have some problems here. Where if you don't feel the mouse clicking under your finger, how do you know it actually happened? Because you're seeing it on the screen, but you don't actually feel the mouse click. You don't have the proprioceptive feedback of the keys under your fingertips or the trackpad under your So there's all sorts of interesting challenges to actually give the user some sense of what their decoder is actually doing or what the Nareulink's actually doing when they're trying to. So, wireless? Yeah, it's bluetooth. Just a bluetooth connection, just like how your normal apple mouse or apple magic keyboard connects to your computer. Same exact thing. In fact, we can basically have this exposed as an hid interface if we want. HID is just the name of the protocol for sending bits from a mouse into a computer. Yeah, I can plug into basically anything. Yeah, I think we chose that interface because it's ubiquitous. Basically, any devices have bluetooth capabilities. Our long term goal is to actually have our own protocol that is safe and secure. But for now, we've chosen it for interoperability. So the question is, can a Neuralink chip repair the paralysis in the long term? We can't do that right now. We have done sort of preliminary work implanting a second Neuralink in the spinal cord. And we can restore naturalistic looking hand and leg movements in animal models. But this isn't something that is, you know, don't, don't hold your breath waiting for it. It's going to be a while. We've got a lot of work to do. But, yes, there's no reason in theory, that we can't repair paralysis. Yeah. I mean, essentially to. I mean, there's no physics barrier to fully solving paralysis. That is perhaps a way to say it, that you've got signals coming from your motor cortex. That if they are transferred past the point where the nerves are damaged, essentially just, it's basically a communications bridge. So you bridge the communications from the motor cortex past the point in the Micro-spine, where the nerves are damaged. And it is possible from a physics standpoint to restore full body functionality. For a physics standpoint, it's a very hard technical problem, but there is nothing that prevents it happening from a physics standpoint. In terms of next phase of rollout? Well we really want to make sure that we make as much progress as possible between each neural link patient. So this is. We're only just moving now to our second neuralink patient. But we hope to have if things go well, high single digits this year. And I don't know, maybe this is somewhat dependent on regulatory approval and how much technical progress we make, but within a few years, hopefully thousands. Yeah. And I think one thing that is important to highlight is that it's not that we built only one device and one surgery. We've done hundreds of surgery. We've built thousands and thousands of devices, even for just the ability to unearth any sort of low frequency failure mode. So we have already been investing very heavily in infrastructure to be able to scale this thing. The device manufacturing side, as well as on the surgery side of things. We want to be able to help as many people as quickly as possible. Obviously, the appropriate hurdles that are regulatory challenges. Yeah. And the device implantation really needs to become almost entirely, if not entirely automatic. In the same way that, say, Lasik eye surgery is done. You don't have an ophthalmologist with a laser cutter by hand. That would be crazy. But the ophthalmologist oversees the Lasik machine and make sure that the settings are correct, and then the machine does everything and restores your eyesight. It's really remarkable how many people have had their eyesight restored with Lasik. And I think there's another one called Smile. They keep making it better. We need to have something similar for a neural link implantation, so that you basically sit down and whatever upgrades or brain fixes are needed that's reviewed by medical expert. Obviously, we want to make sure that that is reviewed correctly, but it really needs to be automatic. So you sit down, and within ten minutes you have a neuralink device installed very fast. I mean, it's very sort of Cyberpunk Deus Ex if you played those games. When we learn neuralik, start to interface with other devices like wheelchair. Great question. We're currently focusing on joining computers and unlock independence in the virtual world. Of course, our plan is, as we mentioned earlier, robotic arm and wheelchair to unlock independence in the physical world. This, of course, add additional risk if you make mistakes in your computer. There's some that, but we are working with the FDA to allow us to require some. Well, it seems like if the wheelchair has an app well, the wheelchair just needs to have an interface. So if wheelchair has a bluetooth interface you could just bluetooth interface to the wheelchair. Thats probably something we should do pretty soon. Paperwork of showing that you can do it safely. You don't, like, drive off a clip? Well, I think we. We can limit the speed so it doesn't go careening off into disaster. But you know, so just make it go slowly at first, but yeah, so being able to sort of really, the neural device just should work generally for anything that's got a bluetooth interface, including potentially an Optimus. Yes. Yes You could communicate with Optimus. Yep absolutely. Optimus. You'll also be able to talk to Optimus. But like just beam it. But you could just. Yeah, instead of talking, just, you could just beam it directly. Or if someone has lost the use of speech, then they can still communicate to an Optimist. They can communicate telepathically to Optimus or by bluetooth. And so even if someone has completely lost the ability to speak, they could still control Optimus or their computer or phone. Also, if you have an Optimus and you have a neuron, you can just map the brain signal to control the physical arm of the robot. And that's a very meaningful thing. If you know folks that have spinal cord injury, one of the biggest requests is to be able to scratch yourself. It's something that quite annoying, actually. And if you have a scratch on your face, you can't fall asleep until you scratch it. Its very convenient to be able to move something physically towards you, to be able to scratch similar things like eating food, if you need somebody to feed you, very hard to have dinner with friends in a way that is a normal social experience. If you can feed yourself, pick up a fork and actually eat a piece of chicken on your own that's a big deal. It prevents and saves a lot of interactions with caretakers and other people in your life that you rely on to take care of you, but really increases your. I think an exciting possibility long term also is to say if you take parts of the Optimus humanoid robot and you combine that with a neural link, let's say somebody has lost their arms or legs. Well we could actually attach an Optimus arm or Optimus legs and do a neural link implant so that the motor commands from your brain that would go to your biological arms. Now go to your robot arms or robot legs. And again, you'd have basically cybernetic superpowers, actually. So the latency from the neuralink to your hand would probably be slightly faster than it is to go to your physical hand. So you can imagine, like if you're a piano player or anything that requires extremely fast hand movements that you could actually have a pretty imbalanced right hand robotic arm control versus left hand physical arm control. That's one of them. Yeah. Like I said, it's just kind of a Cyberpunk Deus Ex in a future where you have cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your biological limbs. And certainly we'll have a much particularly as we expand to a large number of Of customers or patients. For neuralink the understanding of the brain will improve dramatically because really, there isn't a very fine grained understanding of the brain today, because it's just the sensors aren't good enough. You got FMRI, which is pretty good, but it's still not as good as actually having high bandwidth electrodes in the brain. Yeah, I think this is underappreciated as a research tool to move that whole effort forward of really knowing what the physical substance of human thought is. We don't know to the degree that we need to. So neuralink is actually a very powerful research tool. Yeah, I mean, I think we can ultimately understand and fix quite severe psychosis, or, like, if somebody's got, like the, if somebody's got like a Like a delusion that they have a chip in their brain, I was wondering. If you're going to mention that one. We just want to be clear that there's only one person with a neuralink chip in their brain. So for people out there who think we've put a chip in their brain, we'd like to assure you, for what it's worth, you probably won't believe us, but we did not put each chip in your brain. Okay. So there's actually a remarkable number of people who think we have put a trip in their brain, but we have nothing. But in the future, if you would like us to put a chip in your brain, which will perhaps help with the issue of thinking that you have a chip in your brain, then we will be able to do so. So there are people that have severe schizophrenia. They've got basically things that their brain is malfunctioning in some way. And this is actually due to really physical circuitry issues. You can think of the brain as like really, it's a biological computer, and if some of the circuits are crossed it's going to crash, or it's going to have issues that cause it to not work. But with a neural link device, we can fix those issues and give someone who I think has, say, severe schizophrenia or psychosis of some kind allow them to live a normal life, I think that is one of the likely things in the future. So yeah, I mean, yeah, you can certainly imagine, like I'm sure people have, like, parents, grandparents who have memory that's not working as well as it used to be. Sometimes they forget who their grandchildren are or what day it is. And this is something that a neuralink device could help fix. Thats actually one of the personal reason. In many way, like forms of You're literally losing part of your identity, which is just a very, very. Yeah. And it's really just, it's a glitch in the biological computer that is a fixable glitch. It's a short circuit, essentially. How does the device charge and how long does the charge last? Yeah, so the current version that no one has lasts between 4 to 5 hours on a single charge, and it takes about 45 minutes to charge. One thing we've learned from Nolan is that that's actually one of the main limiters for him using it more. It's actually pretty hard to use a product more than like 70 hours a week, but that's about what he... Has used it for in some weeks. Yeah. 70 hours a week. Yeah. I mean, just for context, like, you sleep roughly 8 hours a night. So that's, you know, we're doing better than the bed. The bed is 56 hours a week. And so 70 hours a week of uses. I challenge you to think about products that you've actually used for that duration. But that's, again, some of these points are worth emphasizing again, that Nolan, our first neuralink recipient has used the neuralink device for 70 hours in a week, which is incredible. You probably won't enjoy that I'm sharing his computer use publicly, but I assure you it's for productive things only. But actually, so one of the things we've learned is that in the next version of the device, we really need to like double or increase that battery life. And so I think DJ, the next version is going to be double. Actually double without increasing the charge. Correct. Same charging time, double the battery life, meaning you should get roughly 8 hours of use. And the goal is to actually get to all day use. So you can just charge maybe In your sleep, sleeping pillow exactly as soon as you got like 16 hours of usage, then you basically have 24 hours of usage because it can charge while you're sleeping. One other thing that's important, I think, to call out here is if you're paralyzed, you can't put the charger over your head yourself. And so it's important to think about, it's not just duration of better use, but also can you recharge it yourself independently? We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make that feasible, because then that means that you can, this is what Nolan does. You can use the device, charge it, use the device, charge it, use the device without needing anybody to come in and sort of help you with that, which is a big deal if you're trying to play Civ. until 05:00 a.m. at night when your family's asleep. And the way in which he does that is that there is a charger coil that's about this big. And we actually put it in the sleeve of a beanie or a beanie. And then he wears it and then says, with the voice command, charge, charge or energize. That's the one he likes. How would writing work? So So yeah, the current device that Nolan has is reading. So it's trying to read his essentially, like, wrist movement from one hand. Thats also worth pointing out. In the future, it would be pretty cool to give Nolan a second implant that would allow the other hand to be used. And also. Higher obviously higher active electrode count. So then you could play, essentially play games two handed, because that's normally how you play games. But then with writing it's really just it's an electrical impulse. Instead of reading electrical impulses from the neurons, you issue an electrical impulse Which is obviously critical for vision. So vision is writing, which is just triggering electrical impulse in the vision. Part of the brain. And that activates a pixel. So we actually do have this working in monkeys. We've had it working with monkeys for a while now. Where you can sort of flash a pixel, and then you watch where the monkey, obviously, the monkey's, like a little surprised to see, like, hey, there's a flash here and a flash here, but it gets used to it after a while. But it just. You can see that the pixel is in the right location because the monkey's eyes will dark to that location. It's not on the screen. There's no pixel on the screen. There's no pixel on the screen yet. Yeah. Just verify that you're triggering a pixel in the right part of the brain. So the initial resolution for vision will be relatively low, sort of Atari graphics type of thing. But over time, it could potentially be better than normal vision. And then I guess, in terms of some additional applications for where writing to the brain can be useful applications, as Bliss mentioned, there is feedback. There's appropriate septic feedback. There's feedback, especially. Robot arm, you're trying to grasp a cub, right? You need to know. You got it. 101 egg cups. An egg. It's a very much a delicate balance of not just initiating the movement, but getting the feedback and controlling it accordingly. So there is a meta sensory cortex that's right adjacent to motor cortex. That could be beneficial motor movements. So any changes in neural growth after the device is inserted? We don't see any signs of neural damage. But I. And I guess we. We have seen some rebound on some of the electrodes, right? Correct. And then also, I mean, I guess. I guess, you know, brain is very Plastic, so it's not that plastic. Well, it does diminish quite a bit. After 10, 20 throughout childhood, especially when you get to about 25. Brain really done cooking. Yeah. But there is a little bit of damage done with each insertion. But it's a minuscule amount compared to anything else out there. And so it's an easy amount of damage to recover from, and it's really only detectable on cutting pieces of the brain after the animal is no longer alive. And looking at them under a microscope, you can't really tell during life that there's been any brain. Another way to interpret this question, Have there been any changes in neural growth after the device is inserted? One way to interpret that is the user learning how to use the device. I think on that side of things. There's been tremendous progress. He's put in hundreds of hours trying. To figure out the best way to use this device, because he really thinks that if he can figure this out, he can help share this knowledge. I mean, he's like, on Friday night at 08:00 p.m. he's starting a session of figuring out himself, how to push his own performance to the next level. And that's really a unique learning process, because there's not many people in the world that have had the experience Of moving something with your brain. And so there's a lot of nuance to like, okay, how exactly should I Imagine or attempt to move my wrist. To get the thing to move? Yeah he's really dialed that into Also just the sheer number of hours that he's used, even in the past six months. Right. In many ways, he's using it in his travel, in his plane. Right, effectively, BCI has left the lab. Yeah. One of the questions is, how close are we converting thoughts into text? Right now, it's more about moving curves from the screen on a virtual keyboard. But long term, you should be able to really transmit entire words faster than anyone could possibly type. Hello, world. Today. But we're still in the early days of making that a posh experience. I mean, the other things that we're looking at is sign language. Right. At the end of the day, it is a movement of hand into. Yeah, that's true. Was the brain trying to naturally push the threads out? I mean, this is sort of a universal feature of any implant in the body. The body tries to reject it. And the goal of the surgeons and the technology team is to fight that. And so with artificial hips and with screws in the spine, we've done a really good job of finding biocompatible materials and techniques to fix those implants in the body. I mean, past a certain age, it's getting hard to find someone without some kind of implant. You know, knee, hip some kind of screws in their spine. And so we've got this problem pretty well solved. So to answer your question, yes, the body is trying to get rid of any implant but we can ensure that basically can't. It's also worth highlighting that the threads have not actually moved in the past five months. Theres some still minor movements in terms of some maybe getting pushed in a little bit, pushed out a little bit, but it's more or less very stable and unstable for. And the reason for that is, once you do a brain surgery, it takes some time for the tissues to come in, and then the heart tissue or the neomembrane to actually come in and then anchor the threads in place. And once that happens, everything has been stable and seen much movement. That's where the world record for. Performance starts to come in. Yeah, it was a couple weeks ago. Yeah. The threads. It is important that the threads be extremely tiny. If they're extremely tiny, then the brain does not. The smaller they are, the less likely the brain is to react to them. So that's why you want the threads to be extremely tiny and also to minimize any damage to neurons. So on that note, we do. Plan to actually share some of the tissue response in detail in some of the later upcoming updates. Yeah, it is quite a challenging it's challenging on many fronts to do something like this because you're trying to read and write electrical signals, but you need to have. The threads themselves need to be electrically isolated and not subject to corrosion in the body. You know, just metal by itself is somewhat subject to corrosion or being attacked. So like, in terms of the various coatings and things, to actually make this electrode work while not actually eroding its performance over time is very difficult. Human body is a very, very harsh environment. Very harsh environment. It's a bag of saltwater with bad sensors, that's elevated temperature, that is well regulated. And I'm sure people have experienced dropping their electronic devices in a seawater and in an instant. Yeah. So we better wrap this up soon. I don't know if there's a few last questions. Yes so a good question. So what about upgrades? So yeah, we do think it's going to be important to be able to upgrade the device over time. Just like you wouldn't want like an iPhone one stuck in your brain forever. If you've got an iPhone 15, you probably want the iPhone 15, not the iPhone 1. So I think people, over time, will be able to upgrade their neuralink. So we'll take the neural link device out and put a new one in. And we have done this with some of our animals, and they're actually, in one case, we did it with. We upgraded our device three times. And with a pig. We did. With a monkey as well. Yeah. So. And he's doing fine. Yeah. Pedro has to beat his implant. Yeah, she hit his, I think his record, though, last. Yeah, with the. With an upgrade. Does it still beat him, though? Still beat him, yes, this is true. Humans are top of the species leaderboard right now. Pages, like, what, like eight or something? Pagers, like 8.5 bps. Okay, well, that's a very high score. Yeah. Im not trying to put Pedro down and also to train a monkey to do that is challenge on its own. We have, like, the best animal care team world. Yeah. I just do want to emphasize we do our absolute best to take care of the animals. And when we had, like, a USDA inspector come through, she said that this was the nicest animal Facility she has ever seen in her entire life. I mean, they serve breakfast on an app. The monkey orders room service. I'm not even kidding. Yeah, we have monkey room service, which is rare. Were the only ones who offer monkey room service, so we really do everything we can to maximize welfare of the animals. All right. With that thank you, everyone, for tuning in. I hope you found this interesting.
