Elon Musk claims that Neuralink has implanted a second human volunteer with its experimental N1 brain-computer interface (BCI) and that it is “working very well”. But like the coin-sized device inside the company’s first patient, only a fraction of the electrodes are said to be working properly.
“I don’t want to kid you, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant,” Neuralink’s CEO said during an Aug. 2 podcast interview with computer scientist Lex Fridman. “There is a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well.”
However, “many electrodes” is obviously a relative number. During his lengthy conversation with Fridman, Musk clarified that while the initial results look “so far, so good,” he estimates that only approximately 400 of the 1,024 BCI electrodes surgically implanted in the user’s motor cortex are currently working. given signals. Although the roughly 10 percent improvement in the 80-85 percent electrode failure rate reported in Neuralink’s first volunteer illustrates the major hurdles still facing a technology that Musk previously predicted would resemble telepathy in just a few years.
[Related: 85% of Neuralink implant wires are already detached, says patient.]
“Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a typist or auctioneer. That’s the goal,” Musk posted on his social media platform, X, in January 2024.
Earlier this year, reports confirmed about 870 electrodes completely detached in Neuralink’s first patient, Noland Arbaugh, after the implant moved inside his skull by three times the company’s expectations. Arbaugh, a 30-year-old quadriplegic, explained The Wall Street Journal at the time he began experiencing degraded BCI performance after initially allowing him to control computer inputs and the mouse cursor using his thoughts. Arbaugh indicated that Neuralink did not feel comfortable performing another brain surgery to remove the implant, and instead spent weeks improvising a solution. Engineers eventually designed a modification to the “registration algorithm” that made the implant “more sensitive to neural population signals, improved techniques to translate these signals into cursor movement, and improved the user interface.” No information is currently available explaining exactly what caused Arbaugh’s electrodes to detach, or whether these malfunctioning components could pose future health concerns.
Neuralink has faced numerous regulatory delays and investigations over alleged animal rights violations and safety concerns in the years leading up to its first human trials. In 2023, a medical ethics organization focused on animal rights warned volunteers not to enroll in the company’s PRIME Study, saying they “should have serious concerns” about the device’s safety.
Musk didn’t elaborate on what caused the newest complications during last Friday’s podcast appearance, and instead focused on lofty goals for future Neuralink patients—including eight more volunteers. scheduled to receive N1 devices by the end of the year. He claimed that even with 10-15 percent functionality in Arbaugh’s implant, engineers “were able to achieve a bit-per-second rate of computation.”
Musk then stated that this is “double the world record”, although it is unclear what record he meant. In 2017, researchers at Stanford University published a clinical study detailing the results for three patients who tested previous iterations of different BCIs. Although externally installed and physically connected, two ALS patients achieved computational speeds of 2.2 and 1.4 bits per second, while another volunteer with Lou Gehrig’s disease recorded 3.7 bits per second—four times the previous speed record in that time.
“In years, it’s going to be gigantic,” Musk said Friday. “… I think we’re going to start far surpassing the world record by orders of magnitude in the years to come…. reaching, I don’t know, 100 bits per second, [a] thousand.”