Neuralink has implanted its second brain-computer interface (BCI) chip into a human subject — even as the first person to ever get one admits that it's lost much of its functionality.
In a new interview with contentious podcaster Lex Fridman, Neuralink owner Elon Musk and Noland Arbaugh, the 30-year-old paralyzed man who received the firm's first-ever implant, announced the new implantation news and discussed the process and its pitfalls.
"I don't want to jinx it but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant," Musk told Fridman. "There's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It's working very well."
Be that as it may, things haven't gone quite as well for Arbaugh after his brain chip was implanted at the beginning of 2024. As previous reports indicated, his BCI began glitching soon after it was inserted. Although Neuralink's brightest figured out a workaround, it seems that some of that function loss is permanent.
As the 30-year-old admitted on "The Lex Fridman Podcast," only about 10 to 15 percent of the nodes in his silver dollar-sized brain chip are working — a precipitous loss of function given that the implant has been in Arbaugh's noggin for such a relatively short amount of time.
Arbough's enthusiasm surrounding the implant — and the circumstances that led to its need in the first place — make its decline in functionality all the sadder.
After having been paralyzed from a spinal cord injury while swimming in 2016, Arbaugh was veritably thrilled to become Neuralink's first patient. It seems that the experience of losing most of the chip's functionality, which occurred after some of the threads connecting it to his brain came loose, has marked the young man.
"It sucked. It was really, really hard," he told the podcaster. "I thought it would've been a cruel twist of fate if I had gotten to see the view from the top of this mountain and then have it all come crashing down after a month."
Despite all that, Arbaugh told the podcaster that he's still glad that he can still move a mouse cursor with his mind and have some level of independence left to him that he didn't have before.
It's hard to say how much of that enthusiasm comes from Arbaugh's Musk fandom, but it does still "suck," — to use his parlance — that Neuralink is rushing forward to implant more chips in other brains while his is left with a fraction of its former function.
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