On July 19th, Austin Howard, a computer scientist, asked Elon Musk via twitter if people could listen to music directly from Neuralink’s chip. Elon Musk replied with one word: “yes.”

Yes

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2020

The initial post was from Elon Musk. He was reaching out to potential employees that had solved problems with phones and wearables. He explained in a separate tweet that solving big problems with low cost production is very valuable and that it would solve a lot of brain and spine injuries that would be essential for AI symbiosis.

Solving high-volume, high-reliability, low-cost production problems is especially valued

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 18, 2020

This would solve a lot of brain/spine injuries & is ultimately essential for AI symbiosis

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2020

This goes right along with Tesla’s initial goal of allowing humans the ability to control electronics with their mind. For those who don’t know, Neuralink was created in 2016 and was co-founded by Elon Musk with the plan to make BMI’s, brain machine interfaces. The BMI would connect to the human brain and it would be able to treat brain injuries and neurological disorders. The chip is also important because it would make human beings more like AI when it is implanted in the brain. Elon Musk believes that the development of AI would lead to mass unemployment. In order to compete and survive, humans will have to merge with AI.

On August 2nd, 2019, details about a sensor interface were posted to bioRxiv on Neuralink’s website. The post included a picture of what the sensor could look like:

A packaged sensor device. A. individual neural processing ASIC capable of processing 256 channels of data. This particular packaged device contains 12 of these chips for a total of 3,072 channels. B. Polymer threads on parylene-c substrate. C. Titanium enclosure (lid removed). D. Digital USB-C connector for power and data.

There is little known about the progress of Neuralink, but on July 9th Musk tweeted out Nueralink’s mission statement, “if you can’t beat em, join em,” and when to expect a progress update.

Progress update August 28

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2020