At a live-streamed event on Wednesday evening, Elon Musk announced that Neuralink Corp’s coin-sized brain chip could be implanted in human heads for clinical trials within the next six months.
“We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human, but we’ve submitted, I think, most of our paperwork to the FDA, and probably in about six months, we should be able to upload Neuralink in a human,” Musk said during the event at the company’s headquarters in Fremont, California.
— Ashlee Vance (@ashleevance) December 1, 2022
Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (BCI) is a small chip implanted in a human’s head to allow a person suffering from a debilitating condition, such as the aftereffects of a stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to communicate with their thoughts.
Previously, Musk had promised human trials would begin in 2020, then 2022, and now the target appears sometime in the first half of 2023. He also revealed two other BCIs that could one day be attached to the spinal cord and restore movement in someone with paralysis.
“As miraculous as that may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord,” the billionaire co-founder said.
One of the presentation’s highlights was a video of a monkey “telepathically typing” on a screen with a BCI implant.
Read More: Elon Musk “Confident” Brain Chip Company Neuralink
