During last night’s event, Elon Musk announced the start of Neuralink testing and explained that within six months the chip could be implanted in the human brain. However, a video that is already making its way around the world was also shown during the event.
The protagonist is always a monkey: Sake, this is the name of the specimen, is managed to type the phrase “welcome to show and tell” into the PC with the thought.
As explained by the engineers, visual data captured with a camera inserted into the monkey’s visual cortex allowed it to type the sentence using a virtual keyboard on the screen. The monkey obviously can’t read, but nevertheless it is managed to complete the sentence following artificial flashes. Neuralink, the researchers explained, aims to make this technology available to the blind.
The first generation of Neuralink uses 1,024 electrodes, but the new generation models have brought the total to over 16,000. This growth goes hand in hand with the details detected, which could improve the fidelity of the image seen by a blind person. “If we put a device on either side of the visual cortex, it would generate 32,000 points of light to create an image in a blind personsaid one engineer. “Our goal will be to turn on the lights for someone who has spent decades living in the darksaid Neuralink researcher Dan Adams
The technology is still far from medical uses, and must get the green light from the FDA to begin testing.
