Produced by |Tiger Sniff Technology Group.
Author |Du Yujun.
Edit |Wang Yipeng.
Header |Visual China.
Tesla's operating profit fell by 35%, and everyone thought Musk was going to be anxious. But the east is not bright and the west is bright, and this "Silicon Valley Iron Man" directly made a big job and pulled the brain-computer-related concept stocks to the daily limit.
On January 29, Elon Musk said on the social platform X that Neuralink, a startup dedicated to developing invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, connects the brain and external devices for signal communicationThe implantation of a brain-computer interface chip into the human brain was first achieved in San Francisco, and preliminary results show that neuronal spike detection is promising.
Musk posted the original article on platform X.
Musk never seems to put all his eggs in one basket.
In addition to commercial aerospace, vehicle manufacturing, autonomous driving, AI machine learning and other industries, human brain interface, medicine**, etc. are also important parts of its commercial landscape. Neuralink was founded in 2016 when Tesla's cash flow was rumored to be in serious trouble and it needed to make a profit as soon as possible, so it had to release the Model 3, a low-priced model, to get as much cash flow as possible.
But at the moment when Tesla's expansion was in trouble, Musk still chose to take the lead in the field of brain-computer interface, which is human-computer interaction, and took the lead in the first two rounds of financing of Neuralink with 100 million yuan as the initial capital for research and development.
And this is also in exchange for him at the right time to get a return, and at the moment when the capital market questioned Musk's "Jiang Lang is exhausted", he showed his muscles fiercely.
A technological breakthrough that has been brewing for a long time.
Neuralink has completed four rounds of funding since its inception. In 2017, Neuralink planned to raise $27 million, and it was reported that it actually received $100 million in funding; In May 2019, it received $51 million in Series B financing; In 2021, Neuralink raised funds for 2$0.5 billion; In 2023, Neuralink has another 3$2.3 billion.
Seven years of nearly $700 million in financing have turned Neuralink into a star company with a valuation of more than $5 billion.
With the blessing of abundant funds and the request of Musk himself to "speed up the pace of experiments", Neuralink's technology continues to usher in breakthroughs.
In 2019, the company launched its first implantable brain-computer interface device, and the following year announced the N1 chip implantation plan to conduct brain-computer interface trials in live pigs. In the same year, Neuralink also released a *** that said that 3072 electrodes could already be implanted into the brain. Compared with the progress of the same period, in 2020, the brain-computer project of Duke University, Northwestern University, and New York University in the United States was only able to implant 1,008 electrodes into the human brain in a limited size, which is about one-third of Neuralink.
In 2020, Neuralink successfully collected physiological signals from brain waves in live pigs.
In 2021, the company decoded the brain signals that monkeys control limb shafts to demonstrate how monkeys can play table tennis with their minds.
On September 19, 2023, the company was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin a broad enrollment of patients with limited or no ability to use both hands due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) as first-in-human participants.
On January 29, 2024, Neuralink's implantable brain-computer experiment based on the human brain was initially successful. According to Song Enming, a researcher at the Institute of Optoelectronics at Fudan University, if the pulse peak potential can be detected, this experiment is a great progress for human intracranial nerve signal collection.
On its website, Neuralink says its mission and vision is to "create a universal brain interface that restores autonomy to people with unmet medical needs." To this end, Neuralink named its first product "Telepathy". The brain-computer interface device, which is the size of a coin, consists of a portable wireless sensing device, N1, electrodes with a thickness of five microns, and a robot, R1, which implants electrodes and N1 sensing devices into the brain. The N1 implant primarily records neural activity through 1024 electrodes distributed over 64 lines.
N1 implants, **content from: Neuralink official website
As Musk himself said on the X platform, the initial users of BCI products were those who had lost limbs. Helping paralyzed people realize their ideas and typing is only the tip of the iceberg in Musk's blueprint, and it is far from the ultimate goal of brain-computer interface development. Brain-computer interface is not only a medical solution, but also an unavoidable link before the development of human-computer interaction to the "ultimate form", and its ultimate point is human-computer symbiosis.
Brain-computer interfaces are not sci-fi.
The progress of Neuralink's brain-computer interface research and development seems to have turned "mind control" from a myth into a reality. But in fact, this technology is not science fiction, and the research and development of brain-computer interfaces has long been underway.
In 1970, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began to form a team to study brain-computer articulation, and in 1998, Emory University used an invasive brain-computer interface to help brainstem stroke patients control computer cursors. In 2016, Utrecht University in the Netherlands used invasive brain-computer interaction technology to enable a patient who had lost the ability to exercise due to ALS to use his mind to type on a computer. Stephen Hawking also once raised the possibility of uploading the human brain to a computer.
Trends in the first edition of BCI-related research worldwide (left) and continents (right) from 1994 to 2023, quoted from the Journal of Brain Informatics.
The BCI system consists of three basic function-specific components: signal acquisition, signal processing, and application. According to the different signal acquisition methods, brain-computer interfaces can be divided into three types: non-invasive, semi-invasive and invasive. The first type is non-invasive but has a poor signal-to-noise ratio; Clause.
Two or three types of brain signal readings are more accurate, but they need to be implanted inside the skull. The tightness of the chip's chimerism with the human brain increases sequentially.
The function of brain-computer interface is mainly realized through two aspects: one is to decode the information instructions of brain neurons for the issuance and control of commands; The second is the compilation and transmission of external information. As a result, this technology can help humans replace or improve or restore functions that have been lost due to injury or disease. If the research and development is mature, a large number of patients with lateral sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS or sequelae of stroke, represented by physicist Stephen Hawking, and other people with relatively complete thinking skills, but it is difficult to communicate with the outside world in a timely manner due to damage to the muscles and peripheral nervous system, will greatly reduce the cost of expression.
However, it is not so much that the current brain-computer interface is committed to serving the disabled, but that the current technical ability of the brain-computer interface can only complete some simple control tasks. The brain is so complex that humans have not yet been able to fully deconstruct its secrets, let alone interpret its signals through some kind of technology. In part, Neuralink's invasive technology to open the brain-computer interface transplantation experiment is also due to the fact that the electrodes are closer to the brain and the signal monitoring is more accurate, so it has to sacrifice safety and postoperative recovery.
At the same time, the commercialization prospects of brain-computer grafting are not entirely clear. From chip manufacturing to interface equipment research and development, from material safety to physiological organ adaptation, brain interface companies, including neuralink, are still in the period of technical breakthrough, and there are still many technical difficulties in the clinical trial stage of brain-computer interface.
In addition, the high cost is still a major problem between the commercialization of brain-computer interfaces. Especially when the experimental subjects are changed from animals to humans, they are faced with multiple considerations such as medical safety, humanitarianism, privacy and ethics, and the road to research and development is still long and difficult. Even Neuralink itself has been mired in a multitude of issues such as FDA investigations, executive departures, and public inquiries about animal cruelty.
However, there is no doubt that brain-computer adaptation can expand the function of the human brain, and the applicable scenarios are rich and diverse, which is the inevitable development trend of human-computer interaction. According to the Research Report on the Development and Application of Brain-Computer Connectivity (2023) released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, brain-computer interfaces have the characteristics of extensive empowerment and can be applied to many fields such as game entertainment, health care**, education, advertising and neuromarketing, and neuroergonomics. More than 50 years later, McLuhan's "medium is an extension of the person" is still applicable in the technical application of brain-computer interfaces.
In addition to technology empowerment and capital drive, the breakthrough of brain-computer connection also depends on the people's physiological, pathological and mental demands for enhanced computing of the human brain. There is a "Yang Beyond Possession" emoji before the exam, and "Einstein's brain" has been passionately ordered by tens of thousands of consumers on **, all of which represent the intellectual worship of contemporary people. According to the "Research Report on the Development and Application of Brain-Computer Interface" (2023), Brain-Computer Connectivity is currently in the application popularization period, and it is expected to provide multiple types of solutions and move towards mature commercial use in 2032.
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