Neuralink, the brain-machine interface company founded through Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has released a YouTube video of a macaque monkey named Pager the Pong video game with his mind.
The 3-minute, 27-second video, shared via Musk on Twitter on Thursday night, seems to show the monkey controlling a computer with his brain activity.
“A monkey is literally betting a video game telepathically on a brain chip,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
In the video, a narrator tries to see how Pager can play Pong with his mind.
The nine-year-old monkey, who was placed with two Neuralink devices in any of his brains about six weeks ago, learned how to use a joystick to move a cursor to the goals on a screen in exchange for a banana smoothie that comes with a straw. the narrator says.
He goes on to explain that the company’s “Link” devices recorded Pager’s neural activity while interacting with the computer. This became imaginable through the more than 2,000 tiny cables implanted in the regions of its motor cortex that coordinate the movements of the hand and arm, the narrator said.
This knowledge was then fed into a “decoder algorithm” to wait for expected movements from the pager’s hand in real time.
Once the decoder was calibrated, Neuralink stated that the monkey can use it to move the cursor where it sought to go, rather than relying on the joystick.
In fact, the YouTube video shows Pager controlling a palette in the arcade game Pong while the joystick is disconnected.
But Andrew Jackson, professor of neural interfaces at the University of Newcastle, told CNBC that the brains of PC cursors through monkeys are not new.
“The first comparable demonstrations were published in 2002, arguable that the concept dates back to Eberhard Fetz’s paintings in the 1960s,” Jackson said, adding that the technique has also been proven in humans since 2006. “The control in the video looks impressive, but without seeing a proper post about your data, it’s hard to tell how it compares to the existing state of the art. “
He said the “definitely new and innovative” thing is the fact that no cable passes through the skin and that brain signals are sent wirelessly.
“This is a break for me here, and it’s vital for the protection of human programs (wires through the skin are a possible direction of infection) and also as a way for animal welfare used in neuroscience studies,” Jackson said. .
In August, Neuralink conducted a live demonstration of his generation in 3 pigs, an audience capable of seeing the real-time neural signals of one of the pigs, which Musk called Gertrude.
Based in San Francisco, Neuralink finally needs to increase the speed at which data can move from the human brain to a machine.
While the generation is still in its infancy, Neuralink hopes that its devices will soon allow paralyzed humans to use their minds to run the machines.
On Thursday, Musk said Neuralink’s first product would allow a paralyzed human to use a smartphone with his brain faster than someone with his thumbs.
Artificial intelligence will only be smarter and Neuralink’s generation may one day allow humans to “turn around,” Musk said in a Clubhouse interview in January.
To illustrate the speed of AI’s progress, the innovator, who believes synthetic intelligence will eventually outperform human intelligence, highlighted advances in study laboratories such as OpenAI, which he co-founded, and DeepMind, an AI lab in London that he acquired through Google in 2014. DeepMind “missed games to win wholesale,” said Musk, one of the company’s first investors.
People are 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 measure the bandwidth between its bark and its virtual tertiary layer through several orders of magnitude,” he said. “I’d probably say at least 1,000, or maybe 10, 000, or more. “
The virtual layer you’re referring to can be anything from a person’s iPhone to your Twitter account.
In the long run, Musk argues that Neuralink can allow humans to send concepts to all other telepathies and exist in a “saved state” after his death that can be put into a robot or some other human. was immersing itself in the territory of science fiction.
Do you have any confidential information? We want to hear from you.
Sign up for loose newsletters and get more CNBC in your inbox
Get it in your inbox and more information about our services.
© 2021 CNBC LLC. All rights are reserved. An NBCUniversal department
Data is a real-time snapshot * Data is delayed for at least 15 minutes. Global trade and monetary news, inventory quotes and market knowledge and analysis.
Data also by