Not trying to be funny here: lunch with those guys must’ve been absolutely fascinating. When I worked at Microsoft a couple of decades ago we all loved the job and we talked about work even on breaks. To see the staff of the place you’re describing just hanging out must have been extraordinary.
It was! The guy with the implant did his undergrad in nanotechnology and had pretty much became an expert in BMI stuff so they were a very cohesive team. They had a lot of funny stories too - like when they accidentally put the mind control monkeys in the cage with the cocaine addiction research monkeys and got to see how cocaine affected the brain interface (it didn’t).
The risks of these devices are also significant: you have to get risky brain surgery to install them and then you might still reject the implants and have to get them removed.
A very limited number of people have these - the lab this guy worked at had I think about a dozen people, all with BMIs installed using different surgery techniques (some had the implants on the areas where the brain met the nerves going to the muscles so the output to the neural net was a more "direct" representation of movement whereas others had implants on motion planning areas on the brain giving a more "high level" output to the neural net). There are several such labs in the world. My best guess is there are less than one hundred BMIs installed on people today, as well as quite a few more on animals.