Elon Musk said on Wednesday that he thinks his company, Neuralink, will start testing a wireless brain chip on people in six months. This is after the company missed earlier deadlines he set.
The company is working on brain chip interfaces that, according to them, could help disabled people move and talk again. On Wednesday, Musk said that they will also try to restore vision.
Neuralink, which has offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas, has been testing on animals for the past few years while it waits for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to start clinical trials on people.
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“We want to be very careful and sure that it will work well before putting a device into a person,” Musk said during a long-awaited public update on the device.
Musk gave a nearly three-hour-long presentation at Neuralink’s headquarters to a small group of invited guests. He talked about how quickly the company is making progress on its device.
“At first, the progress, especially when it comes to people, may seem agonizingly slow, but we are doing everything at the same time to bring it to scale,” he said. So, in theory, progress should go faster and faster.
When Reuters asked the FDA for a comment, they did not answer right away.
Musk said that the first two ways the Neuralink device will help people are to help people who can’t see and to help people who can’t move their muscles. “Even if someone has never seen anything in their whole life, like if they were born blind, we still think we can give them sight,” he said.
The event was supposed to happen on October 31, but Musk changed the date just days before without saying why.
In Neuralink’s last public show, which was more than a year ago, a monkey with a brain chip played a computer game by just thinking about it.
Musk also runs the electric car company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), the rocket company SpaceX, and the social media site Twitter. He is known for having ambitious goals like colonizing Mars and saving the world. With Neuralink, which he started in 2016, he has the same big goals.
He wants to make a chip that would let the brain control complicated electronic devices. This would eventually help people who are paralyzed get their motor skills back and treat diseases like Parkinson’s, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. He also talks about how the brain and artificial intelligence could work together.
Neuralink, on the other hand, is not on time. Musk said in a presentation in 2019 that he hoped to get approval from the government by the end of 2020. Then, at a conference at the end of 2021, he said that he hoped to start testing people this year.
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Employees say that Neuralink has missed internal deadlines more than once to get FDA approval to start human trials. Reuters reported in August that Musk had talked to Synchron, a competitor, about a possible investment earlier this year after being frustrated with Neuralink’s slow progress.
In July, Synchron made a big step forward when it implanted its device in a patient in the U.S. for the first time. It was approved by U.S. regulators for testing on people in 2021, and studies on four people have already been done in Australia.
