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 was first publicly reported in March 2017. 

In January 2017, Musk approached Pedram Mohseni and Randolph Nudo, who owned the rights to the name "NeuraLink". These two neuroscientists strove to create an electronic brain chip to treat traumatic brain injury. They made significant progress and completed preliminary testing but did not receive enough funding or support from investors to continue. Musk approached them and offered tens of thousands of dollars for the company’s name.

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 (of which $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 since moved that projection 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 a large amount of euthanization of primates that underwent medical trials. Veterinary records of the monkeys showed a number of complications with electrodes being surgically implanted.

In September 2024, the company announced that its latest development effort, Blindsight, will allow those who would otherwise be blind to regain some level of vision, provided the visual cortex is undamaged. The development received "breakthrough" status from the federal government, which will accelerate development.

Company

History 

Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk and a founding team of eight scientists and engineers: Max Hodak, Benjamin Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson, and Vanessa Tolosa. The group of initial hires consisted of experts in areas such as neuroscience, biochemistry, and robotics. The trademark "Neuralink" was purchased from its previous owners in January 2017.

In April 2017, Neuralink announced that it was aiming to make devices to treat serious brain diseases in the short term, with the eventual goal of human enhancement, sometimes called transhumanism. Musk said his interest in the idea partly stemmed from the concept of "neural lace" in the fictional universe in The Culture, a series of 10 novels by Iain M. Banks.

Musk defined the neural lace as a "digital layer above the cortex" that would not necessarily require extensive surgical insertion but could be implanted through a vein or artery. He said the long-term goal is to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence", which he perceives as an existential threat to humanity if it goes unchecked. He believes the device will be "something analogous to a video game, like a saved game situation, where you are able to resume and upload your last state" and "address brain injuries or spinal injuries and make up for whatever lost capacity somebody has with a chip."

Jared Birchall, the head of Musk's family office, was listed as Neuralink's CEO, CFO, and president in 2018. , Musk was its majority owner but did not hold an executive position. By August 2020, only three of the eight founding scientists remained at the company, according to an article by Stat News that reported that Neuralink had seen "years of internal conflict in which rushed timelines have clashed with the slow and incremental pace of science." , Neuralink was headquartered in San Francisco's Mission District, sharing the Pioneer building with OpenAI, another company Musk co-founded. , Neuralink's headquarters were in Fremont, California. 

In April 2021, Neuralink demonstrated a monkey playing the game "Pong" using the Neuralink implant. While similar technology has existed since 2002, when a research group first demonstrated a monkey moving a computer cursor with neural signals, scientists acknowledged the engineering progress in making the implant wireless and increasing the number of implanted electrodes.

In May 2021, co-founder and president Max Hodak announced that he no longer worked with the company. Co-founder Benjamin Rapoport cited safety concerns as a major influence on his decision to leave Neuralink in 2018.  Rapoport subsequently founded Precision Neuroscience, emphasizing the use of surface electrodes as opposed to the penetrating electrodes of Neuralink, in order to address brain damage and other safety concerns caused by Neuralink's devices. Only two of the eight co-founders remained at the company by January 2022.

On February 8, 2024, Musk changed the location of Neuralink's business incorporation from Delaware to Nevada after Delaware Chancery Court Chief Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick voided Musk’s $55 billion pay package at Tesla.

Technology 
In 2018, Gizmodo reported that Neuralink "remained highly secretive about its work", although public records showed that it had sought to open an animal testing facility in San Francisco; it subsequently began doing research at the University of California, Davis. In 2019, during a live presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, the Neuralink team revealed to the public the technology of the first prototype it had been working on. It is a system that involves ultra-thin probes inserted into the brain, a neurosurgical robot to perform the operations, and a high-density electronic system capable of processing information from neurons. It is based on technology developed at University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley.

Probes 
The probes, made mostly of polyimide, a biocompatible material, with a thin gold or platinum conductor, are inserted into the brain through an automated process performed by a surgical robot. Each probe consists of an area of wires that contains electrodes capable of locating electrical signals in the brain and a sensory area where the wire interacts with an electronic system that allows amplification and acquisition of the brain signal. Each probe contains 48 or 96 wires, each of which contains 32 independent electrodes, making a system of up to 3,072 electrodes per formation.

Robot 
Neuralink says it has engineered a surgical robot capable of rapidly inserting many flexible probes into the brain, which may avoid the tissue damage and longevity problems associated with larger, more rigid probes. This surgical robot has an insertion head with a 25 μm diameter needle made of tungsten-rhenium designed to attach to the insertion loops, inject individual probes, and penetrate the meninges and cerebral tissue; it can insert up to six wires (192 electrodes) per minute. A linear motor powers the needle, enabling fast retraction acceleration and varying insertion speeds. A 50-μm tungsten wire that has been bent at the tip and is driven both axially and rotationally makes up the pincher. An imaging stack is also included in the inserter head for needle guidance, real-time insertion viewing, and verification.

Electronics 

Neuralink has developed an application-specific integrated circuit to create a 1,536-channel recording system. This system consists of 256 amplifiers that can be individually programmed, analog-to-digital converters within the chip, and peripheral circuit control to serialize the digitized information obtained. It aims to convert information obtained from neurons into an understandable binary code in order to achieve greater understanding of brain function and the ability to stimulate these neurons back. So far, Neuralink's electrodes are too big to record the firing of individual neurons, so they can record only the firing of a group of neurons; Neuralink representatives believe this issue may be mitigated algorithmically, but it is computationally expensive and does not produce exact results.

In July 2020, according to Musk, Neuralink obtained a FDA breakthrough device designation which allows limited human testing under the FDA guidelines for medical devices.

Public compression challenge

On May 29, 2024, Musk issued a request for public input on a challenge facing Neuralink. He suggested that due to the size of the data in need of transmission, a compression rate of more than 200x was needed for proper function. The challenge also specified that compression needed to be lossless, work under low power, and compress data in real time. Software consultant Roy van Rijn called the prospect of 200x lossless compression "just outlandish."

Animal testing and alleged harm 
Neuralink tests its devices by surgically implanting them in the brains of live monkeys, pigs, and other animals. This has been criticized by groups such as PETA. 

In August 2020, Neuralink conducted a live demo in which the brain activity of a pig, Gertrude, was displayed in real time. A removable device the size of a coin (23 millimeters) implanted in Gertrude's brain recorded signals from the neurons connected to her snout as it interacted with its environment, such as when it sniffed or touched things. The data showed that the technology could read and interpret brain signals, which is key to developing applications that could treat neurological conditions, enable brain-to-machine communication, or enhance human cognition.

The demonstration also had two other pigs. One had had a Neuralink chip implanted in its brain and subsequently removed to demonstrate that the chip can be safely removed without damaging the pigs' health. The third pig had never had a chip implanted in its brain. It was for comparison to show the similarity in health and behavior of implanted and non-implanted pigs.

From 2017 to 2020, Neuralink's experiments on monkeys were conducted in partnership with University of California, Davis. At the end of the partnership, UC Davis transferred seven monkeys to Neuralink. In 2022, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal welfare advocacy group, alleged that Neuralink and UC Davis had mistreated several monkeys, subjecting them to psychological distress, extreme suffering, and chronic infections due to surgeries. Experiments conducted by Neuralink and UC Davis have involved at least 23 monkeys, and the PCRM believes that 15 of those died or were euthanized as a result of the experiments. The PCRM also alleged that UC Davis withheld photographic and video evidence of the mistreatment.

In February 2022, Neuralink said that macaque monkeys died and were euthanized after experimentation, denying that any animal abuse had occurred. In December 2022, it was reported that Neuralink was under federal investigation by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for animal welfare violations. Additionally, a Reuters report cited claims by several Neuralink employees that testing was being rushed due to Musk's demands for fast results, which was leading to needless suffering and deaths among the animals. A September 2023 exposé by Wired provided additional details on the primate deaths based on public records and confidential interviews with a former Neuralink employee and a researcher at the California National Primate Research Center. Those records showed complications with the installation of electrodes, including partial paralysis, bloody diarrhea, and brain swelling.

In 2022, after being rejected for human clinical trials by the FDA, Neuralink performed more tests on pigs to address safety concerns. Some of these pigs were observed to have developed granulomas, or inflammatory tissues, in their brains. Neuralink could not determine the cause of the granulomas, but made official statements declaring that the Neuralink implant and its associated threads were not the cause. 

In July 2023, an investigation by the United States Department of Agriculture found no evidence of animal welfare breaches in the trials other than a self-reported incident from 2019. The PCRM disputed the investigation's result.

In October 2023, Wired reported that Neuralink worked to keep details of animal suffering and death hidden from the public. In November 2023, U.S. lawmakers asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Neuralink deceived investors by omitting details about possible animal deaths.

On March 21, 2024, Musk said that Neuralink's second product would be called Blindsight and was already working in trials with monkeys. He said it operates at low resolution that is expected to improve and that no monkey had died due to or been seriously injured by a Neuralink device, contradicting earlier reports.

Human testing 
Neuralink received FDA approval for human clinical trials in May 2023. The FDA had rejected a 2022 application to pursue human clinical trials, citing "major safety concerns involving the device's lithium battery; the potential for the implant's tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue."

In September 2023, Neuralink began its first human trials. It recruited people with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis under an investigational device exemption by the FDA.

On January 29, 2024, Musk said that Neuralink had successfully implanted a brain computer interface (BCI) device the company named Telepathy in a human on the previous day and that the patient was recovering from the surgery. As it was a "first in human" and "early feasibility" trial to develop a concept, the company was not obligated to disclose details about the procedure or to prove safety or efficacy. Neuralink provided a few details in February on the implant in a recruitment brochure for the Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) study. On February 20, Musk said that Neuralink's first human trial participant had been able to control a computer mouse by thought.

On March 20, 2024, Neuralink introduced the person who had received the first Neuralink implant in the clinical trial as 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh through a livestream on X. Arbaugh had become a quadriplegic after experiencing a diving accident dislocated his C4 and C5 spinal vertebrae. Later in the livestream, Noland demonstrated his ability to move a cursor on a computer screen to allow him to control music and play games such as chess. He expressed support for the implant in dramatically improving his quality of life. He acknowledged that the device was not perfect but said he was excited about the future. Arbaugh later said in an interview that 85% of the device's implant threads had completely detached while his brain had shifted approximately three times as much as Neuralink expected. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that Neuralink would proceed with a second trial participant, with the FDA signing off on the company's proposed fixes for a problem that occurred with Arbaugh. In August 2024, the second trial participant was reportedly successfully implanted.

The second trial participant, pseudonym "Alex", was reportedly able to create 3D designs by using the CAD software Fusion 360. Alex has been said to have created a custom mount for his Neuralink charger through this process. Additional accounts of Alex's Link show that he has been able to play first-person shooter games at a higher level than he could previously . Unlike Arbaugh, Alex's implantation procedure reduced brain motion during the surgery and placed the implant closer to the brain's surface in an attempt to mitigate thread retraction. Since the initial operation, Alex has been reported to not have experienced any thread retraction .  Alex said, "The Link is a big step on the path of regaining freedom and independence for myself."

In November 2024, Neuralink received approval from Health Canada for its first clinical trial in the country. The name of the trial is CAN-PRIME.

Reception 
Scientists have cited technical challenges for Neuralink. In 2017, a journalist at the IEEE Spectrum magazine asked for comments from five researchers who had worked on BCI implants, including Thomas Oxley. Oxley called the Neuralink developments "exciting" but expected no real results in the foreseeable future. At a live demonstration in August 2020, Musk described the device as "a Fitbit in your skull". Several neuroscientists and publications criticized these claims. MIT Technology Review accused the demonstration of having the main objective to "stir excitement", adding, "Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried to) treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide". In response to Musk's description of Neuralink's advancements as "profound", Andrew Jackson, a professor of neural interfaces at Newcastle University, said, "I don't think there was anything revolutionary in the presentation."

Thiago Arzua of the Medical College of Wisconsin argued that Neuralink's functions are not novel and that ideas for a brain–machine interface (BMI) are at least 50 years old. He cited successful control of a robotic prosthetic arm by a man that gave him haptic feedback, which he used in 2016 to give President Obama a fist bump. Arzua said that the 2020 Neuralink presentation "showed little more than a flashy new design for a BMI with more electrodes". Duke University researcher Miguel Nicolelis made similar criticism, saying that most of what Neuralink claims as "novelty" was already performed by his lab in the early 2000s; that there are ethical concerns about how the company markets and uses this technology; and that most patients don't want to undergo surgery to recover their movements, and so his team developed non-invasive techniques for BMI, as demonstrated in the opening ceremony of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, in the context of the Walk Again Project.

See also

References

Further reading 
  (whitepaper)

External links 
 
  of Neuralink's presentation on July 16, 2019
  of Neuralink's presentation on December 1, 2022
 Andrew Huberman: "Dr. Matthew MacDougall: Neuralink & Technologies to Enhance Human Brains" (interview with Neuralink's head neurosurgeon, April 2023)

Elon Musk
Transhumanism
Health care companies based in California
Brain–computer interface
2016 establishments in California
American companies established in 2016
Companies based in Fremont, California