Musk's Neuralink Weighed Removing Patient's Brain-Chip Implant
upstart writes:
Neuralink's brain-chip implant is working - except that some of the device's threads pulled away from the first human patient's brain.
Elon Musk's company shared a progress update in a blog post on Wednesday and said a number of threads "retracted" from the patient's brain a few weeks after his surgery. That rendered the implant less effective.
The "Link" device lets the patient move a computer cursor using his thoughts. An earlier blog post said the process involved more than 1,000 electrodes in the device and at least 64 threads, each thinner than a strand of human hair.
Neuralink measures the speed and accuracy of the Link's cursor control using a metric called bits per second. The Wednesday blog post said a higher BPS score meant it had stronger cursor control.
The retraction of some of the threads caused the electrodes in the device to be less effective, Neuralink said. It said it had since made tweaks which in turn "produced a rapid and sustained improvement in BPS, that has now superseded Noland's initial performance."
[...] The Wall Street Journal reported that Neuralink considered removing the implant from the patient altogether, citing unnamed sources.
In February, Musk said on an X Spaces session that "progress is good" and that "the patient seems to have made a full recovery."
[...] The Journal reported that Neuralink planned to implant 10 devices in other human patients by the end of this year.
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