Grimes Using Custom Brain Interface From Elon Musk Competitor

Wonder how Elon's gonna respond to this one.

Brain Drain

Famed musician and former Elon Musk boo Claire "Grimes" Boucher wanted a brain-computer interface (BCI) for her birthday — and one of Neuralink's apparent competitors was happy to comply.

After Grimes tweeted about getting a "non invasive brain computer interface" for her birthday, AJ Keller, the CEO of the startup Neurosity, confirmed in an interview with Insider that his firm had indeed made a custom brain gadget for the "Kill V. Maim" singer.

While a tech company sending a nerdy sci-fi celebrity fan a gadget wouldn't really be news on its own, the fact that Grimes is the mother to two of Musk's children and is seemingly on pretty acrimonious terms with the Canadian-South African billionaire, who owns perhaps the most famous and one of the most controversial BCI companies in the world, makes this story incredibly juicy.

In the replies to her tweet, Grimes did pay lip service to her ex's BCI company, which plans to implant computer chips into actual human skulls — if they ever get government approval and can stop killing monkeys with their experiments, that is.

When asked by another user if the headset was "like an external [N]euralink," Boucher responded that Neurosity's BCI is "less advanced" because the company is "younger and whatnot," and doesn't require surgery the way Musk's BCI does.

"U can move the mouse on the computer and stuff," she added. "Early days but insanely cool. Non surgical options is [sic] a whole vibe, and so sci fi!"

Cursor Sailor

Although Neurosity's headsets are meant to be EEG monitors to help people focus and perform better, it appears, as Insider notes, that the company's developers have taken their offerings into more advanced territory, at least experimentally.

In both her responses and a since-deleted tweet, Grimes suggested that she was able to use her roughly $1,000 headset, known as "the Crown," to control a computer mouse using her brain. Futurism has reached out to Neurosity to corroborate that claim, given that it's pretty far outside the realm of the company's EEG-monitoring use case.

In his interview with Insider, Keller, the Neurosity CEO, said that he's not angling to compete with Neuralink.

"It's like the difference between a microscope and a telescope," he said. "Both do imaging, but both are doing totally different types of imaging."

Musk, for his part, still appears to be down bad for Grimes.

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