Elon Musk-backed startup Neuralink has wired a monkey to play video games using its mind

Tesla founder Elon Musk said his startup Neuralink has put a computer chip into a Monkey’s skull to program it to play video games using its mind.

The chip in the monkey’s skull has “tiny wires” that connect to its bran, according to Musk.

“We have a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull with tiny wires who can play video games with his mind. It’s not an unhappy monkey,” Musk said during a talk on ClubHouse, a new social media entertainment app. “You can’t even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight dark Mohawk.”

Musk, who also spoke about space travel, artificial intelligence, crypto, and colonies on Mars, said Nueralink hopes to figure out the possibility of monkeys playing “mind pong” together. “That would be pretty cool,” said Musk.

The Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink CEO says Neuralink aims to increase the rate of information flow from the brain through an implementable computer-brain interface. Musk believes that AI will get smarter than what it is now, and Neuralink’s brain technology would play a strategic role in the future of AI. He also believes that someday machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, referring to the breakthroughs made at research labs like OpenAI, an AI research lab he co-founded, and DeepMind, a London-based AI lab that was acquired by Google in 2014.

“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” Musk said. “I’d say probably the least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.”

The brain cortex is an essential part of the brain that plays a key role in memory, perceptual awareness, thought, attention, consciousness, and language. Linking the Neuralink chip to the brain could allow humans to send information to each other using telepathy in a “saved state” which could be transferred into a robot or another human after they die, according to Musk, explaining the long-term plan of Neuralink.

However, in the near term, the goal of Neuralink is to implant chips into quadriplegics who suffer from brain or spinal injuries so they can “control a computer mouse, or their phone, or really any device just by thinking.” He explained that there are “primitive” versions of the brain-linking technology, with “wires sticking out of your head” compared to Neuralink’s version which is like a “Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go into your brain.”

Musk admitted that Neuralink was entering into sci-fi territory, and would “probably” release some videos that show its progress in the next month or so. In August 2020, Neuralink had a live demo of its technology on three test pigs.