Neuralink, plans by Elon Musk to implant the brain and interface with AI.

Meet the Guys Who Sold “Neuralink” to Elon Musk without Even Realizing It. (excerpts from article by Antonio Regalado. April 4, 2017).

What’s in a name? Neuralink is a lot sweeter now that a billionaire is behind it.

Previously, we learned that Elon Musk will start a mind-computer interface company called Neuralink. The name added a brainy new entry to Musk’s growing scroll of big ideas—Tesla, SolarCity, SpaceX, and the Hyperloop.

But as the news of Musk’s nascent venture to merge man and machine spread across social media, an electrical engineer in Ohio named Pedram Mohseni must have been slapping his forehead.

That's because in January he'd agreed to sell the name Neuralink to Musk without realizing it.

Mohseni, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, and his scientific partner, Randolph Nudo of Kansas University Medical Center, had owned the trademark on "NeuraLink" since 2015 after creating their own startup company.

The pair of longtime neurotech researchers had developed a device that might help people with brain injuries. But their initial contacts with investors hadn’t advanced very far, when a stranger approached them offering tens of thousands of dollars for their company’s name. They accepted. No one mentioned that Musk, whose net worth is $14.7 billion according to Forbes, was behind it.

“They approached us, we negotiated, and now Elon Musk will be the rightful owner of Neuralink,” says Mohseni.

Instead of hard feelings, Mohseni says he’s excited. Finally, tech titans are throwing money behind some far-out ideas that a small number of neuroscientists have long championed and doggedly sought to advance.

In addition to Musk, the online payments entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is putting $100 million in a company called Kernel, which is also developing brain implants.

In uncovering details of Musk’s venture, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company will develop new ways to treat disease but ultimately also a means of fusing human and machine intelligence. That’s something Musk seems to think is necessary to counter the risk of runaway artificial intelligence.

It’s “difficult to dedicate the time” to yet another high-tech venture, in addition to electric cars and space rockets, Musk tweeted, “but existential risk is too high not to.”

Just how brain technology will let humanity keep up with AI is anyone’s guess—and Musk’s company hasn’t said what it intends. But Rikky Muller, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says treating medical conditions and the aim of connecting consciousness to computers “are not unrelated, because anything implanted in the human body has to meet all the standards of a medical device.”

No one knows that better than Nudo and Mohseni. Their story—the story of the original Neuralink—shows the kind of challenges Musk will face trying to fill the brain with electronics.

Starting in 2011, Mohseni, a bioengineer, and Nudo, a brain specialist, began exploring an idea for an electronic brain chip to treat traumatic brain injury. Their idea: reëstablish damaged connections by recording neurons in one part of the brain, then transmitting the chatter to another. By 2013, they’d even demonstrated that their prototype could help brain-damaged rats.

That’s when the duo formed NeuraLink (which they spelled with a capital "L"). But raising money proved difficult. Any device that’s going to end up in the human brain needs to be as reliable as a Swiss clock and could easily take $200 million to develop and test. What’s more, while Nudo and Mohseni had some provocative data, they couldn’t say for sure the system would help anyone. Even if they did, there might not be enough eligible patients to justify the big expense. That’s also been a problem for researchers developing devices that read the brains of paralyzed people and allow them to move robotic arms. “Even though it’s a terrible condition, it’s not that many people,” says Nudo. “The thing in neurotech is that even if it works, it’s hard to see profitability.”

Nudo adds: “The feeling among investors was reluctance to invest in invasive brain technology, unless there is a very strong proof of principle. The place where our startup was is that we had a name without a product.”

Now, Musk is in the same position. But Mohseni thinks the billionaire might be able to blast through obstacles. “The whole idea of uploading or downloading thoughts to a healthy person, well, that is pie in the sky, but he has the credibility and vision to talk about those things,” Mohseni says. “We still have to advance our work a bit more, obtain some preliminary human data, before we can go to the investment community. But Mr. Musk doesn’t have that problem.”

A spokesperson for Musk declined to say why the entrepreneur wanted the Neuralink name badly enough to pay for it, but Mohseni believes it was worth every penny. “The name Neuralink really nicely captures what is happening in the field of neuromodulation,” he says.

Only a very few types of electronic brain implants have ever reached the market. The most widely employed, and sold by medical device giant Medtronic, is a “deep brain stimulator” able to stop the tremors of people with Parkinson’s disease. More than 140,000 patients have received versions of Medtronic’s stimulator, and the company’s brain modulation division has about $500 million in annual sales.

More recently, a company called NeuroPace began selling the first “closed-loop” brain implant for epilepsy patients. That’s a leap forward because the device can both detect a seizure coming on and then zap the brain to stop it, creating an automatic control loop. It's a neuralink, if you will.

But other ventures have not gone so well. The list of failed brain-interface companies includes BrainGate and Northstar, a company that liquidated itself in 2009 after spending $132 million in an attempt to help stroke patients recover with a brain implant.

Nudo and Mohseni, who have funding from the U.S. Army and the Paralyzed Veterans of America, say they would still like to raise money from investors to advance their idea towards commercialization.

Now that they sold off the name Neuralink to Musk, Nudo says he has been thinking up new names for their company. “But I don’t want to tell you what they are. Someone else would buy the trademark before we do,” he says.

The Musk connection

Neuralink Corporation is an American neurotechnology company that is developing implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) based in Fremont, California. Founded by Elon Musk and a team of seven scientists and engineers, Neuralink was launched in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017.

Since its founding, the company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities. By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (of which $100 million was from Musk) and was employing a staff of 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width) threads into the brain. They then demonstrated a system that read information from a lab rat via 1,500 electrodes. They had anticipated starting experiments with humans in 2020, but have since moved that projection to 2023. As of May 2023, they have been approved for human trials in the United States.

In April 2017, Neuralink announced that it was aiming to make devices to treat serious brain diseases in the short-term, with the eventual goal of human enhancement, sometimes called transhumanism. Musk had said his interest in the idea partly stemmed from the science fiction concept of "neural lace" in the fictional universe in The Culture, a series of 10 novels by Iain M. Banks.

Musk defined the neural lace as a "digital layer above the cortex" that would not necessarily imply extensive surgical insertion but ideally an implant through a vein or artery.He said the long-term goal is to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence", which he perceives as an existential threat to humanity if it goes unchecked. He believes the device will be "something analogous to a video game, like a saved game situation, where you are able to resume and upload your last state" and "address brain injuries or spinal injuries and make up for whatever lost capacity somebody has with a chip.

Jared Birchall, the head of Musk's family office, was listed as CEO, CFO and president of Neuralink in 2018. As of September 2018, Musk was the majority owner of Neuralink but did not hold an executive position. By August 2020, only three of the eight founding scientists remained at the company, according to an article by Stat News which reported that Neuralink had seen "years of internal conflict in which rushed timelines have clashed with the slow and incremental pace of science.

In April 2021, Neuralink demonstrated a monkey playing the game "Pong" using the Neuralink implant. While similar technology has existed since 2002, when a research group first demonstrated a monkey moving a computer cursor with neural signals, scientists acknowledged the engineering progress in making the implant wireless and increasing the number of implanted electrodes. In May 2021, co-founder and president Max Hodak announced that he no longer works with the company. As of January 2022, of the eight cofounders, only two remain at the company.

Culture criticism

A January 2022 article in Fortune highlighted criticism of Neuralink's corporate culture from anonymous former employees. They described a "culture of blame and fear" and one with vacillating priorities. Additionally, Musk allegedly undermined management by encouraging junior employees "to email issues and complaints to him directly".

Technology

In 2018, Gizmodo reported that Neuralink "remained highly secretive about its work", although public records showed that it had sought to open an animal testing facility in San Francisco; it subsequently started to carry out research at the University of California, Davis. In 2019, during a live presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, the Neuralink team revealed to the public the technology of the first prototype they had been working on. It is a system that involves ultra-thin probes that will be inserted into the brain, a neurosurgical robot that will perform the operations and a high-density electronic system capable of processing information from neurons. It is based on technology developed at UCSF and UC Berkeley.

Probes

The probes, composed mostly of polyimide, a biocompatible material, with a thin gold or platinum conductor, are inserted into the brain through an automated process performed by a surgical robot. Each probe consists of an area of wires that contains electrodes capable of locating electrical signals in the brain, and a sensory area where the wire interacts with an electronic system that allows amplification and acquisition of the brain signal. Each probe contains 48 or 96 wires, each of which contains 32 independent electrodes, making a system of up to 3072 electrodes per formation.

Robot

Neuralink says they have engineered a surgical robot capable of rapidly inserting many flexible probes into the brain, which may avoid the problems of tissue damage and longevity issues associated with larger and more rigid probes. This surgical robot has an insertion head with a 40 μm diameter needle made of tungsten-rhenium designed to attach to the insertion loops, inject individual probes, and penetrate the meninges and cerebral tissue; it is capable of inserting up to six wires (192 electrodes) per minute.

In July 2020, according to Musk, Neuralink obtained an FDA breakthrough device designation which allows limited human testing under the FDA guidelines for medical devices.

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Excerpts from Wikipedia, and article by Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology review.

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