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Musk reveals progress with Neuralink's second human subject.

On August 2, local time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared in a podcast that his brain-computer interface company Neuralink has successfully implanted a brain-computer interface into the body of the second human patient.

During the show, Musk revealed, "I don't want to jump to conclusions, but the second implant seems to be going very well. The signal is strong, there are a lot of electrodes, and it works very well." Musk said that the 400 implanted electrodes in the second patient's brain are working. He predicts that in five years, the signal transmission speed of brain-computer interfaces will be faster than human communication.

In Musk's view, Neuralink has the potential to help AI security. Human communication is too slow, which will inevitably weaken the connection between humans and computers. If the human output rate can be greatly improved, humans can better combine human will with artificial intelligence. He believes that with the help of brain-computer interfaces, the human information output rate is expected to increase by three, six or even higher orders of magnitude.

He also expects that Neuralink will provide implants to another eight patients this year. In other words, Neuralink will complete clinical trials for 10 brain-computer interface patients this year.

For the second subject, Musk revealed that his spinal cord injury was similar to that of the first patient (the first patient was paralyzed in a diving accident), but he did not disclose more detailed information about the second subject.

During the interview, Musk also mentioned Neuralink's safety and regulatory issues. He emphasized that the company follows the gold standard in all operations to ensure safety and is subject to supervision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Musk did not disclose when Neuralink performed the surgery on the second subject. However, on July 10, local time, Musk revealed in a live broadcast that Neuralink is expected to perform an in vivo implant surgery on the second human patient next week. He hopes that the number of subjects this year will reach a high single digit and increase to thousands within a few years. Musk emphasized that this requires regulatory approval.

Neuralink was founded in 2016. The company's main research direction is brain-computer interface, which realizes "human brain-machine interaction" by developing a device that can be implanted in the brain. After the company was founded, it received multiple rounds of financing. According to foreign media reports, as early as June 2023, Neuralink's valuation exceeded US$5 billion.

On January 29 this year, the first human patient, Noland Arbaugh, received a Neuralink implant. Musk said, "You can control your phone or computer with just your thoughts, and control almost any device through them. The first users will be those who have lost their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a typist or auctioneer. This is our goal."

On February 20, Musk revealed new progress again during a SpaceX live event on X, saying that Arbaugh "appears to have fully recovered with no adverse reactions that we know of. The subject was able to move the mouse on the computer screen simply by thinking."

However, on May 8, Neuralink revealed that some of the wires that Arbaugh had embedded in brain tissue had fallen off, affecting the rate of information transmission, causing the loss of some data and causing the device to fail to work properly.

In a live broadcast on July 10, Neuralink executives revealed that only about 15% of the channels in Arbaugh's brain-computer interface can work properly. Even so, Arbaugh still uses the brain-computer interface to watch videos, read, play chess and other video games, sometimes up to 70 hours a week. They are making adjustments to solve these hardware problems.