Neuralink Corporation is an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and others, developing implantable brain–machine interfaces. The company's headquarters are in San Francisco; it was started in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017. According to Bloomberg, since its founding, the company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities. By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding and was employing a staff of 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin threads into the brain, demonstrated a system that read information from a lab rat via 1,500 electrodes and anticipated to start experiments with humans in 2020.
Company overview
Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk, Ben Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Max Hodak, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson, and Vanessa Tolosa. In April 2017, the blog Wait But Why reported that the company aims to make devices to treat serious brain diseases in the short-term, with the eventual goal of human enhancement, sometimes called transhumanism. Musk said he got partly interested in the idea from a science fiction concept called "neural lace" that is part of 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 imply extensive surgical insertion but ideally an implant through a vein or artery. Musk explained that the long-term goal is to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence", which Musk perceives as an existential threat to humanity if it goes unchecked. At the present time, some neuroprosthetics can interpret brain signals and allow disabled people to control their prosthetic arms and legs. Musk aims to link that technology with implants that, instead of actuating movement, can interface at broadband speed with other types of external software and gadgets. As of 2020, Neuralink is headquartered in San Francisco's Mission District, sharing the former Pioneer Trunk Factory building wih OpenAI, another company co-founded by Musk. Musk was the majority owner of Neuralink as of September 2018, but did not hold an executive position. The role of CEO Jared Birchall, who has also been listed as CFO and president of Neuralink, and as executive of various other companies Musk founded or co-founded, has been described as formal. The trademark "Neuralink" was purchased from its previous owners in January 2017.
Electrodes
By 2018, the company had "remained highly secretive about its work since its launch", although public records showed that it had sought to open an animal testing facility in San Francisco; it subsequently started to carry out research at the University of California, Davis. In July 2019, Neuralink held a live-streamed presentation at the California Academy of Sciences. The proposed future technology involves a module placed outside the head that wirelessly receives information from thin flexible electrode threads embedded in the brain. The system could include "as many as 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads" each 4 to 6 μm in width. The threads would be embedded by a robotic apparatus, with the intention to avoid damaging blood vessels. Currently, electrodes are still 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 might get mitigated algorithmically, but it's computationally expensive and does not produce exact results.
