[HN Gopher] Neuralink Prime Study Progress Update - User Experience
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Neuralink Prime Study Progress Update - User Experience
Author : pr337h4m
Score : 30 points
Date : 2024-05-08 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neuralink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neuralink.com)
| stoniejohnson wrote:
| > In the weeks following the surgery, a number of threads
| retracted from the brain, resulting in a net decrease in the
| number of effective electrodes
|
| 1. Was this expected/seen in animal studies?
|
| 2. Will it degrade further? Are follow-up surgeries needed?
| aredox wrote:
| Yes
|
| Yes Yes
|
| Neuralink is putting the cart before the horse: none of what
| they are doing here are the true challenges of neural
| interfaces, which are:
|
| -either neurons move away from the stress caused by the probes
|
| -or neurons are killed by the probes.
|
| The lifetime of neural probes due to this problem is under a
| year, and let me remind you these direct probes need to be
| _drilled into your skull_. Neuralink is not solving anything:
| they are scoring cheap publicity points by doing something
| (signal analysis) nobody has done that much before, because _it
| is too early to do it_
|
| These guinea pigs will be worse off after neuralink will have
| (ab)used them for this publicity stunt.
| mlindner wrote:
| You say they're doing things that are cheap and trivial, but
| isn't the major innovation of Neuralink the fact that they're
| using very fine wire probes? No one else has done this and
| instead used relatively hard fixed arrays of needles. This
| causes damage to blood vessels among other things.
| Neuralink's advantage is they exactly void this type of brain
| damage.
| aredox wrote:
| It is not true that "no one else has done this". Do you
| think neural interface researchers didn't thought of
| something like that? There are plenty of other electrode
| designs apart from the "nails board", and none solve the
| problem I mentioned well enough yet.
| thelastquestion wrote:
| Neuralink has previously discussed their implantations in
| monkeys, in which they claim implantations for > 1 year with
| increasing performance (e.g., in their deep dive on youtube
| [1]). That would seem to indicate that this wasn't seen in
| animal studies (maybe just a matter of degree). Figure 04 they
| have in the article suggests a steady state may have been
| reached with respect to some factors, but I guess they could
| continue to improve things on the model side while still
| experiencing degradation if the improvements outpace the effect
| of degradation. Since this doesn't seem to impact safety, it
| doesn't seem like a follow-up surgery would be needed as long
| as the device continues to be useful; if it essentially became
| a brick then the patient would probably want it removed (which
| requires another surgery). They've never talked about any
| surgeries for "maintenance" before, and given the size of the
| threads, I doubt the same previously implanted ones could be
| reinserted.
|
| 1. Neuralink Show and Tell, Fall 2022
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDYmXTYi4)
| mlindner wrote:
| > 2. Will it degrade further? Are follow-up surgeries needed?
|
| They said in the weeks following and it doesn't seem to have
| continued to happen. However I would expect things to degrade
| eventually as this is still very early days.
| modeless wrote:
| > During his first-ever research session, Noland set a new world
| record for human BCI cursor control of 4.6 BPS. He has
| subsequently achieved 8.0 BPS and is currently trying to beat
| scores of the Neuralink engineers using a mouse (~10 BPS).
|
| This is what I was wondering since the original announcement. How
| does what they achieved compare to previous efforts and to a
| regular mouse. Pretty impressive I think! He won't be winning any
| Starcraft tournaments but it seems like a big improvement.
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