Neuralink, A Startup Founded By Elon Musk Has Chipped A Monkey To Play Video Games With Its Mind

Neuralink, a startup founded by Elon Musk has chipped a monkey to play video games with its mind.

The startup put a computer chip in the skull of the monkey and used tiny wires to connect to its brains

During a talk on Clubhouse, Musk said the monkey is not unhappy and that one cannot see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight-like dark mohawk.

Amidst other things, he said Neuralink is trying to figure out if it can use its chips to get monkeys to play “mind Pong” with each other.

According to Musk, the startup is trying to develop an implementable computer-brain interface. He describes it as a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go into your brain.

He said the aim of Neuralink is to increase the rate at which information can flow from the human brain to a machine

To illustrate the pace of progress in AI, the innovator — who believes that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence — pointed to breakthroughs made at research labs like OpenAI, which he co-founded, and DeepMind, a London AI lab that was acquired by Google in 2014. DeepMind has “run out of games to win at basically,” said Musk, who was an early investor in the company.

People are in effect already “cyborgs” because they have a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to phones, computers, and applications, according to Musk.

“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” he said. “I’d say probably at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.

The cortex is a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. The digital layer he refers to could be anything from a person’s iPhone to their Twitter account.