How do you place electrodes without metal filaments? It’s been validated in monkeys.

Is that true?

There was a throwaway comment about that at a press conference and lots of rumors (positive and negative), but the white paper only mentions “monkey” once—-and in a reference to another group’s paper.

Elon musk said on stage that they had put it in a monkey and had the monkey move a cursor with it. I’ve been following musk very closely since 2010 and he’s never blatantly lied so I think this will not be the first time. He has made errors about timelines and etc but never, ever blatantly lied about something so concrete. And it’s plausible to boot.

Not to swing my credentials around, but I actually record neural activity, from monkey brains, for a living.

It can be unexpectedly hard in so many different ways. The dura covering the monkey brain is much tougher, the brain itself is larger, more convoluted, and moves more, even just from breathing and heartbeats). The animals have busy, clever little fingers, so the interface itself needs to be mechanically robust and durable because these implants need to last for years.

I certainly want this to be true: with the exception of neuropixels, electrode technology has been depressingly stagnant. On the other hand, I need to see data before I get too excited and if I did have it, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

> never blatantly lied.

Funding secured

This is merely a mistatement of fact. Lying is what the poors do!

It wasn’t a lie...

you need something that conducts electricity. There are groups that use silicon implants.

This isn't new at all. Groups have been doing this for decades. Neuralink wants to mass produce the devices.

People have been recording brain activity for decades, but the scale is very different. Until about 10-15 years ago, most labs were using a handful of electrodes (my PhD work, for example, was done with 1-2 at a time). With cheaper amplifiers, it's become more common to use arrays with ~32-96 electrodes and they're often implanted chronically in the brain.

Neuropixels are fairly new and offer ~300 channels (selectable from ~1000). The neuralink thing would increase this another 10-fold.