#neuralink

#neuralink

Six years ago, I asked Sam Altman at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco how OpenAI, with its complicated corporate structure, would make money. He said that someday, he'd ask the AI. When everyone snickered, he added, "You can laugh. It's all right. But it really is what I actually believe."

Recent reports have indicated that Elon Musk's brain-implant startup, Neuralink, has leased a five-story, 144,000-square-foot building in South San Francisco. At the same time, Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is reportedly also looking around for a Bay Area office. The news marks a noticeable step in Musk's expanding presence in the Bay Area, despite the move of his biggest companies, Tesla and SpaceX, to Texas.

In The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, the futurist Ray Kurzweil imagines the point in 2045 when rapid technological progress crosses a threshold as humans merge with machines, an event he calls "the singularity." Although Kurzweil's predictions may sound more like science fiction than fact-based forecasting, his brand of thinking goes well beyond the usual sci-fi crowd. It has provided inspiration for American technology industry elites for some time, chief among them Elon Musk.

The Neuralink chip, known as the Link or Telepathy, was implanted by surgeons at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, marking the first such procedure at a Miami hospital. The chip allows RJ to wirelessly control a computer, as demonstrated by his ability to play video games using only his mind.