Elon Musk’s neural implant startup Neuralink has turned 10 this year. Neuralink was founded in June 2016. Musk funded it with $100 million of his own money. Elon Musk and other members of the Neuralink executive team showed off their tech in a livestreamed presentation for the first time in 2019. Since then Neuralink has come a long way. Neuralink’s main brain-computer interface is called the “N1 Implant”. It’s the size of a coin. The chip is embedded in a person’s skull. The N1 Implant is inserted into brain areas associated with motor control. Once inserted, the idea is that patients can control computer cursors (or robotic limbs at some point) through their thoughts.The N1 Implant is reported to be being tested in people with spinal cord injuries and degenerative neurological disease where the connection between their brain and their bodies has been damaged. In 2025, Wired reported that Neuralink was trying to trademark two product names: Telepathy and Telekinesis. But the United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected Neuralink’s attempt to trademark the product names Telepathy and Telekinesis, citing pending applications by another person for the same trademarks. However, this does not seem to have changed Elon Musk’s Telepathy plans for Neuralink. As a recent post on Neuralink’s plans reposted by Elon Musk himself reveals. Similarly a Tesla engineer named Yun-Ta-Tasi wrote, “Human-to-human interaction is often bandwidth-bound instead of compute-bound. Thus, the next evolutionary jump would be direct communication in latent space, skipping the long-latency encoder-decoder loop.” To this Elon Musk replied, “Maybe first attempt at this for Neuralink later this year.”
Elon Musk on Neuralink’s ‘year-end’ plans
Other than replying to Yu-Ta-Tsai’s post Musk also reshared a post on Neuralink’s plans, here’s the post:“Elon just hinted at Neuralink’s next major leap:Not just brain-to-computer controlHigher-bandwidth communication between humans, AI, and eventually humans themselvesThis is much bigger than typing with your brainAI is moving at a speed humans simply can’t match through keyboards, phones, voice, or even language itselfWe think in rich ideasThen we compress those ideas into wordsThen someone else has to decode those words back into meaningThat is painfully low bandwidthAI does not have that problemMachines can process, respond, and improve at insane speedIf humans stay trapped in slow communication loops while AI keeps accelerating, we lose the advantageNeuralink is the bridge“In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI risk / civilizational risk reduction by improving human-to-AI and human-to-human bandwidth by several orders of magnitude” — Elon MuskBrain → computer is step oneBrain → AI is the next frontierBrain → brain is the long-term visionHuman intent moving closer to the speed of thoughtThis is how humans stay competitive in the age of superintelligenceNot by slowing AI downBy upgrading human bandwidth”
Leave a Reply