Elon Musk’s quest to wirelessly connect human brains with machines has run into a seemingly impossible obstacle, experts say. The company is now asking the public for help finding a solution.
Musk’s startup Neuralink, which is in the early stages of testing in human subjects, is pitched as a brain implant that will let people control computers and other devices using their thoughts. Some of Musk’s predictions for the technology include letting paralyzed people “walk again and use their arms normally.”
Turning brain signals into computer inputs means transmitting a lot of data very quickly. A problem for Neuralink is that the implant generates about 200 times more brain data per second than it can currently wirelessly transmit. Now, the company is seeking a new algorithm that can transmit this data in a smaller package — a process called compression — through a public challenge.
As a barebones web page announcing the Neuralink Compression Challenge posted on Thursday explains, “[greater than] 200x compression is needed.” The winning solution must also run in real time, and at low power.
Absolutely, they need a better filter and on-board processing. It is like they are just gathering and transmitting for external processing instead of cherry picking the data matching an action that is previously trained and sending it as an output.
I’m guessing they kept the processing power low because of heat or power availability, they wanted to have that quiet “sleek” puck instead of a brick with a fanned heatsink. Maybe they should consider a jaunty hat to hide the hardware.
Gathering all the data available has future utility, but their data transmission bottleneck makes that capability to gather data worthless. They are trying to leap way too far ahead with too high of a vanity prioritization and getting bit for it, about par for the course with an Elon project.