Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

It seems that his neuralink project is an Apollo mission of the current young generation that will help people choose their dream job or studying topic It's already much easier to speak about "brain science" to laypeople and convince them to work on/in it

of course, if he spectacularly crashes then that would create neuro-winter but I hope he is too good to not sell even minor breakthrough and to be fair he don't abandon his ideas out of whim

I don’t think if he crashes it’ll change the outcome. Tesla had multiple failures!He’ll just just pivot. Neuralink is good for science b/c 1)increases public awareness 2)draws VC capital 3)pushes market competition This all unlocks more opportunities for labs/academics!

It's been discussed after the neuralink demo and it's not clear cut that this is great for the field. Musk makes wild claims about what is novel, while labs that have been working for years on this technology (and have mature/awesome products) are ignored. >

I'm also (still) not convinced that public awareness is great if it's deeply oversold. People (and VCs and grant agencies) only have so much appetite for claims that don't deliver. Musk may just end up briefly eclipsing the long-running efforts in this area. >

Nothing in the interface demo was close to novel. Wireless, small footprint implants for neural recording have been in active development for a long time and it's not clear that Elon's product is even better. The only novelty is the surgical bot,(which is pretty cool if it works)

to me the good thing was rather that they took a handful of research ideas and are packaging it in a professional way. Cool. Useful.

I was very skeptical but touring so many BMI labs over the years and being right at the margins of this field, I think useful BMIs in patients are very close and an industrial view on a focused use case and packaging up a product is an important and timely thing.