From electric cars to spaceships to social media. Elon Musk is constantly getting into our heads, so maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that Musk now wants to actually get into our heads. His company, called Neuralink, has been racing to develop a brain implant that can convert a person's thoughts into a range of commands a computer can understand.
After testing on animals, the company is now seeking a volunteer for its first human clinical trial, and if the product works as intended one day, it could conceivably improve the lives of people suffering from paralysis, stroke, and hearing and vision loss. Of course, Musk being Musk, he also has a more out there motivation for racing to complete this device.
Elon's vision this is a guy who's consumed by the idea that AI might go a muck, might leave the human race behind. And so in this very futuristic version of this tech, we would be these human machine hybrids where information could go into our brains sort of matrix style, like you download Kung Fu, or you download Spanish, and then information would go out. Maybe you could send your thoughts directly to another person.
That's Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Ashley Vance. He's been covering Neuralink for years, including ten trips to the company's facilities in California and Texas. He's gotten to watch the place and its founder in action. Ashley's here to tell us what he found inside what's arguably Elon Musk's most ambitious and controversial project.
Is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic, judicious guy that you want to be in control of the world of mind control devices? Probably not.
Is he the.
Person that will probably be the first to sort of make this happen?
Yes, I'm Wes Kasova. That's today on the Big Take. Hey Ashley, good, see.
Again, Thank you for having me.
So you've had a pretty interesting time lately taking a look at Elon Musk's big project, Neuralink, and you called it the most consequential product launch of his career. That's kind of like a big statement given everything that this guy has done.
You can read that in a few different ways. I yes, in one sense, Neuralink is this brain implant, and so it's a medical device. And look, I mean, rockets and cars are serious business. But in the past these companies have messed up on their first product launches. SpaceX had rockets blow up, Tesla struggled for years and years and years to mass produce its car. You had some room
for error to get these things right. The US Food and Drug Administration is taking a very close look at Neuralink, and so this is going to go into a human for the first time after many years of animal trials, and so you know, there's a lot of pressure. And then for the rest of us, I mean, the sort of exciting and possibly scary thing about all this is this device really could be this incredible piece of technology that one day in the near term, it's going to
help people with illness. One day maybe it makes us all these human machine hybrids. And so there's a lot of stake here. You know, maybe the future of the human species.
Tell us about Neuralink exactly what it is and what must hopes that the thing is going to do.
This company started in twenty sixteen, it's always had pretty much the same goal, which is basically to put a computer chip into people's brains. And the reason you would do this is to you essentially put a electrodes right up against neurons in our brain and you can watch brain activity is neurons fire. They fire in certain patterns depending on what you're doing. And so the big idea is to read this brain activity, put it through AI algorithms and all kinds of other software, and come to
some insights about the brain. In the near term, this would be things like people who are paralyzed or have als or strokes and are having trouble speaking or having trouble using a computer. This device would be able to read their thoughts. They would think what they want to do on a computer, think about navigating a web page or typing what they want to say, and the brain implant would send those signals out and it would get translated onto a computer. So sort of amazing Elon's vision.
This is a guy who's consumed by the idea that AI might go amuck, might leave the human race behind, and so in this very futuristic version of this tech, we would become these human machine hybrids. So Neuralink has been working on an implant to make this happen. As far as I follow all these companies, it's the most advanced, powerful and invasive implant that anyone's ever built.
In this space. I guess they call it the Brain computer interfaces or BCIs has been pretty busy, and Neuralink has a lot of competition that at the moment at least seems like they're a little bit ahead of Musk.
I follow this field closely, and there's two There's two big competitors that at least Elon Musk has been most concerned about in the meetings that I've watched. And one company is called Synchron. They're headquartered in New York. They have a brain implant. It does not require a crany ectomy to have your skull cut open. They actually it's like a stent, similar to a stent that would go in your heart. They thread this stent through your arteries
into a blood vessel in the brain. And for years now they started in Australia and are now New York. They have many people, dozens of people who have had the same plant. Essentially, the person kind of thinks it's almost like a binary on or off as to what you want to do on a computer. Do you want to select this letter, do you want to select this word? Do you want to click your mouse here? And that people think and that happens.
And some listeners might remember we went to visit Synchron back in March and I spoke to the company's CEO, Thomas Oxley. Here's a bit of that.
On the Apple iPhone. There is a way in which you can start to control the iPhone without having to touch the screen if you have an ability to send command clicks into the iPhone. So we have our patients sending their command functions and we've integrated into the iPhone where they're able to navigate their way and use the iPhone. It's not as fast as what you and I can do with our fingers, but Apple have created mechanisms of accessibility control that allow these types of inputs to work.
So that's a really big deal with getting our patients back control over the iPhone.
And if you'd like to listen to that show, there's a link in the episode nets.
There's another company based in Switzerland called Onward. They are not in the brain, they are on the spine. They put an implant right on a person's spine and I have seen in person in Switzerland. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. A fully paralyzed person. This Italian gentleman named Michelle. He'd been paralyzed for three years from a car accident, he walked again right in
front of me. It's not a totally natural gait, but this is a person who's standing up walking across rooms. Another young woman, Julie, she was paralyzed in a car accident. And when you're paralyzed often you have trouble regulating your blood pressure. And it used to take her seven hours to get out of bed each day. She would pass out so many times. And she had this implant and it's totally changed her life.
And so what is the difference between what these companies that seem to be a bit ahead of neuralink or doing and what Neuralink aims to do once they're able to implant the device.
So in a lot of ways, some of these startups are tackling very specific problems. You know, synchron is giving you this amazing but sort of limited access on your computer Onward has about a dozen electrodes on the spine. Neuralink is looking to put dozens, if not hundreds of
electrodes into the brain. So it's just this massive increase in computing horsepower, and they want to be you could think of it as like a general purpose computing system, so it's not just doing words, it's not just the spine. They want to link a brain implant with a spinal implant. They want to do speech, they want to do movement, they want to restore feeling to people's limbs, they want to have people walk again, they want to you know,
restore vision, I mean sort of do everything. And it's through having this extra computing horsepower that they would be able to pull all these things off.
Can you describe exactly what it would take to get one of these Neuralink implants into a person's brain.
So from the start, Elon wanted this to be something closer to like a consumer electronics device. And so the way Neuralink does it, surgery is a human surgeon for the moment, cut a hole in the skull, and the Neuralink has built this rather amazing robot that has a tiny, tiny, tiny needle and it grabs these threads is what Neuralink
calls them. They're wires with electrodes on them, and the robot peers through this hole in the skull with all kinds of computer visions, software and cameras and then it pushes these threads into your brain. And after it's done that with sixty four of these threads in this first human trial that'll start in just a matter of weeks.
Then the hole in your skull is plugged up, for lack of a better term, with Neuralink's computing device that has a battery, wireless communications to send the signals out, and then it has all of this computing systems to read the signals in your brain, and that device goes flush with your skull. When I've seen primates and pigs that have had this implant, you couldn't tell which animal has had the implant and which hasn't.
How long does it take for the robot to implant all of these wires in the device itself.
The actual surgery would take two to three hours when you take into account being anthesized and the surgeon's getting ready to go into the r and prepping the patient. Once the robot sets to work, it's about a twenty five minute procedure. They've done it as quick as eighteen minutes. The faster the better because it does less damage to
the brain and the recovery is quicker. And in the future, you know, Elon's vision for this is that we all show up at like a clinic or some sort of store, and you go in and the robot does everything, and it takes about ten or fifteen minutes, and you leave with a chip in your head and a new more advanced human.
While you're waiting for your tesla to get charged in right after the break. What's it like to work at Neuralink? Actually, you've spent a lot of time at Neuralink. There are two big facilities, I guess ones in California and ones in Texas watching this operation and watching Elon musk. What's it like there.
I've been going for about three years. I'm the only reporter. I'm pretty sure that's ever been allowed in there. It's fascinating. As with all of Elon's companies, you know, he has a gift for assembling very smart people and having them charged toward a goal, and Neuralink is no different. I mean that these are world class engineers in this room. This company is a little odd in that Elon only pops in about once a month come check out what's
going on. And it's ostensibly run by a triumvirate of people, and so Elon will show up and everybody briefs him on the latest of what's happening with the company. I went to a couple meetings. I found them sort of funny. Typically, Elon will stand at the head of this table and eight to ten top engineers will be gathered around it, and they start presenting on what's going on in Elon. He's actually surprisingly adept. He knew a lot about brain science,
about the implant technologies, about the rivals. I was actually quite surprised. I was, on one hand, kind of impressed with his knowledge in this field, just as he did with rockets in self driving cars. Elon seems to learn by osmosis from talking to all of his engineers and actually digest these facts and can talk in quite detail about what's going on in the brain and with these implants.
On the other hand, you know, sometimes he comes up with suggestions for the device that you could tell the engineers aren't quite convinced that it's going to work or that he knows what he's talking about it. So, you know, in the story I described this as when I would witness these moments, is Elon sort of having this like PhD and self confidence. I mean, he's not afraid to share his opinion, and the engineers kind of let it wash over them. And nod and then go back to
whatever they're doing. But then Elon will jump in and his commandment pretty much always is to move faster. And this has made people nervous. Again, this is a biotech device, this might be an area where you don't want to move faster. So in one meeting I saw this firsthand. The engineers had gone through a demo that Neuralink was planning to do, and Elon says to them, we want to get there with a maniacal sense of urgency, maniacal
like the world is coming to an end. We need to get there before the AI takes over, or at least try And this was not an unusual out of the blue remark. I went to several meetings and this was a common refrain.
Another big moment of friction that you describe is when one of the people at Neuralink said it was going to take a long time for the FDA to approve this device.
Yeah, and it wasn't even just to approve the device. It was once we get our first human trial, the FDA wants us to wait a year before we do another implant. And Elon just blurts out, unacceptable, that cannot happen. We want to be going into more humans as quickly as we can. And so he starts advising the engineers on how this is going to play out in his mind, and he says, look, I've been at SpaceX where we battle against the Federal Aviation Administration to get permits to
launch our rockets and try new prototypes. And as long as we can show that this works and make some progress, the FDA will bend to our will and let us do more these So, you know, he tells them, look, we need to get this into a person, and that person needs to be an advocate for the technology. If need be, we'll start a letter writing campaign, and I'm quite sure the FDA will let us move faster.
The Elms you described in the story as always pushing to move forward, always trying to be more ambitious than any of the people who work for him think that can be is very much the way he's operated as other companies. But you also write about a kind of tension about Musk himself that lately his reputation has been a lot different than it was when he was sort of the hero of SpaceX and the hero of Tesla in those earlier days.
Yeah, I mean probably I might have watched this more than anyone, being his biographer and writing my book during kind of an earlier time in Elon's life. He's changed, you know, he's kind of a professional troll on Twitter. He seems to want to pick fights with people for sports. He's obviously all over the map up politically and getting involved in world affairs. And so he's this mercurial wild
card of a human with this particular technology. It's a brain implant, if you want to joke around, I don't even think it's joking. It's a mind control device that they want to put into literally billions of people one day. We've seen Elon in the war in Ukraine with his Space Internet systems. You know, if he decides he doesn't want the Ukrainians to be using the Space Internet systems one weekend, he turns them off, and then so people
talk to him and he turns them back on. I mean, there's a bit of very serious whimsy attached to all this. And so is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic, judicious guy that you want to be in control of a world of mind control devices? Probably not. Is he the person that will probably be the first to sort of make this happen. Yes, And so this is always the great conundrum with Elon, I think, and increasingly so. I mean, this is a field that he should know
nothing about. Neuralinks should not work. I mean, you don't just go into the biomedical field and start producing something like this and have it work and sort of race ahead of everyone when you've come from the car and the rocket and the internet software industry. And yet it is, it seems to be we're on the cusp of this working.
And so I think this is a great dilemma with Elon that we all have to deal with, is this guy gets stuff done, but we don't always want him to be the one doing it when we.
Come back Neuralinks testing on animals, especially, maybe the most controversial part of Neuralinks operations has been testing on animals. And there's been a lot written about what's happened to some of the animals who've been used in developing this product.
Absolutely, and just to give people a flavor for Neuralinks set up and how these animals play in the company started in California. It has a headquarters in Fremont, which is on the edge of Silicon valley, and in that facility they've got pigs, they've got monkeys, about almost twenty monkeys, and so these animals do get implants. They live at the NEURALA facility. Their watch their brain activity is red.
And then in Austin, Texas, which I think is going to be the future home of Neuralink, they've bought thirty seven acres of former ranch land and they already have about one hundred sheep and pigs there in a barn. The hope is to have sort of a primate set up where the primates can be indoors and outdoors. That facility also has operating rooms where they have the robots to perform these surgeries, a lab to go over the samples and everything.
You know.
The huge controversy around the animals has been that there's been reports gathered from public documents from reporting that some of these surgeries have gone wrong, that pigs and the monkeys in particular have suffered as a result of the implant. Some of these stories I have to give credit to Wired and Reuter's they've done most of the reporting here. They've suggested it was unnecessary suffering on parts of the animals, and the stories are hard to read, really hard.
You know.
You hear about about monkeys being despondent, bleeding, scratching at these things. It's a tough read.
We should say that Neuralink has said it's made mistakes during exploratory surgeries, but it says it was human error, not issues with its equipment, and the company stresses that the most troubling reports are from its early years before it built its own testing facility in Fremont. Neuralink says it's gone to great lengths to provide better living conditions for the animals there.
In twenty twenty, Neuralink brought all of its animal testing and operation in house. And so this was the Remont facility and now the Austin facility. And so I'm the only reporter that has seen the stuff uphand I don't
want to be an apologist for Neuralink. All I can say is that the animals that I have seen over these three years are incredibly well cared for, and in fact, Neuralink is doing many pioneering things in terms of animal care that you wouldn't never see at a contract research facility.
So what is different about the way neuralink treats animals.
Now, if you go into a contract research animal center, the something like monkeys are just going to be kept in rows of cages. They are not given really anything in their cage. The way that they're usually coaxed into doing a research experiment is by withholding their food and water until they do their work, and then it's given to them as a treat. At Neuralink, it's it's just very different. I've seen the same group of seventeen to twenty monkeys for the last three years. They've all had
these brain implants. They, as far as my eyes indicate, are healthy and active. Neuralink has them in their kind of natural habitat, not like outside, but in their regular cages. Their cages are several times bigger than what you would find at one of these research organizations. The animals volunteer
to do the testing. Neuralink wheels the laptops in front of them, and they're offered like a smoothie or some fruit to munch on while they do the experiment for a couple hours, and if they don't want to, they're free to leave. Neuralink doesn't bind them in any way. They just sit in their cage. Their cages are also full of toys. It looks like a child's playground. I mean, they have all the slides and things to play with. There's music playing through the whole room. There's TVs they
can watch. It's just it's very, very different to anything you would see at a contract research center. The monkeys that have been at the Fremont facility for the last three years, seventeen of them that I've seen, totally fine. They've been implanted, They've even had the implants take it
out and been upgraded. In some cases. There were two or three that did not take to doing the tests and just were not interested in doing the test, and so they were retired to a center that sort of takes care of retired animals, and there was one animal that was euthanized. Neuralink says it was part of a planned euthanization that happens at the end of some of these tests.
What is Neuralink said about his animal testing when he asked them about it.
To their credit, they go through detail by detail with me, and they've done some of this on their website as well. Each of the incidents that's been reported so Neuralink has been relatively upront they've been a very secretive company. Again, I'm the only reporter that's ever been allowed in there.
I think they're very sensitive to the animal stuff. Elon adds to everything because he just brings this heightened scrutiny and he is this guy that is hard charging and wants to go fast, and people want to know if there's consequences as a result of that.
And you've talked to him quite a bit about Neuralink in the project. What does he say about it when you talk to him about his aim for this company.
Well, I've always found it confusing, just like I find his position on AI in general to be confusing. I mean, he's the doom and gloomer when it comes to AI, and yet he's funded two AI startups, one of them Open Ai, which is the world's leading AI company. Tesla has some of the best and highest number of AI engineers in the world. And then Neuralink is this huge gamble. When you talk to Elon about this, I mean he just does not see these two sides of the coin
at all. I mean this very black and white issue for him. We will either become the AI's pets or we will evolve alongside of them.
Ashley, you said that very soon Neuralink will begin it's very first trial of the device. What happens next? Where does the company and this product, I suppose you'd call it go from here?
Yeah, so the trial there isn't a specific date set yet, but it should happen within the next few weeks, or I would assume maybe early twenty twenty four. They've selected a couple of hospitals where they want to do this first implant in a human. They've opened up a call for participants, and so this first person is likely to be paralyzed in all four limbs, probably a pretty young patient, because you generally want to be as healthy as possible
for these types of trials. So this first person would get this implant in the relatively near future. They've had thousands of people knocking on their door to take part in this trial. And then obviously the FDA will be looking very closely to make sure the device is not causing any physical harm. That's kind of step one. And then you have this process where you begin to read out the data and see how well the device is working.
Like with primates and other animals, you have this amazing moment where a human can actually tell you what this thing feels like, how well it's performing, give you much more direct feedback if everything goes well. Elon turned out to be right about how the FDA was perceiving these things.
They've already been given approval to it. Again, things have to go right, but to do another implant about three months instead of a year after this first one, and so the company is looking to do about eleven implants in twenty twenty four, get up to maybe around like fifty the next year. And then I saw a slide deck that talked about tens of thousands of surgeries about five years into the future.
Ashley, I was great talking to you. This is just fascinating.
Thank you, Thanks so much.
By the way, if you want to keep up with the latest on Elin Musk, be sure to check out Bloomberg's new podcast called elin Inc. Each week, he host David Papadopoulos and a panel of Bloomberg journalists talk about Musk, his companies and the surprising ways they intersect. Give it a listen. You can find Elon Inc. Wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.
For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. And we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Zeneb Sidiki and Frederica Romanello produced this episode. Kil de Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.
I'm