Thousands of people signed up to have Neuralink's brain chip implanted

Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk's first biographer, said thousands of people have signed up for Neuralink's brain implant trials.

Vance said he has visited Neuralink facilities about 10 times in the past three years. He is the author of Musk's first biography titled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for the Future, published in 2015.

"Despite attracting interest from thousands of potential candidates, the company still hasn't found the first suitable person," Vance said. "Neuralink has not yet selected a volunteer or someone willing to let a surgeon remove part of their skull to insert electrodes and ultra-thin wires into their brain."

According to Vance, when attaching the chip to the brain, it takes the doctor several hours to perform the craniotomy, then it takes 25 minutes for the robot to insert the device along with the ultra-thin chip part consisting of about 64 different fibers. The fibers are so thin that they are only 1/14 the width of a human hair.

Neuralink currently faces major competition from other brain-computer interface startups such as Synchron and Onward. "Musk warned Neuralink to speed up the same way the world deals with the apocalypse," Vance revealed.

Neuralink was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2016 with 7 other members, but the majority have left. The company's goal is to successfully develop a brain-computer interface to allow humans to merge with AI in the future.

In the middle of this year, Neuralink was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test implanting chips in humans. Previously, the company had applied many times but was rejected on grounds of insecurity.

On September 19, Neuralink said it had passed the test from an independent review board consisting of leading neurological experts and doctors in the US, thereby allowing it to implant chips in the brains of patients with dementia. disabled. The company also recruited volunteers, but so far the transplant has not taken place.
According to Vance, the company aims to chip in 11 people next year and more than 22,000 people by 2030.

Neuralink has not yet commented.

Research company Grand View Research estimates that the global brain implant market size has reached 4.9 billion USD by 2021 and will double by 2030. Currently, this activity is limited to the medical field. practical, but can be applied to other fields in the future such as playing games, manipulating virtual reality, entering data using brain waves or watching videos without looking at the screen.