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Comment by boardwaalk | Hacker News Reader

Well, in the update they showed themselves predicting the position of a pig's limbs as it walked on a treadmill.

If your bar is reading thoughts & dreams, you'll probably be right. But that's probably not what is needed to be useful in helping people with variety of ailments.

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Not to burst your bubble but I don't think they're not predicting X,Y,Z limb positions in that demo. The traces on the left don't line up with the video, what would they actually represent?

It looks a lot more like the result of adding physical movement markers to a pig with an implant, and then mining the recorded neural data for signatures which correlate with the marker data. I'd be willing to wager that's exactly what is shown in that video.

Not to take anything away from the Neuralink team, but predicting joint movements in a steady gait is one thing. Predicting join movements in starting, stopping, changing speed, and accurately manipulating objects is quite another.

Presumably they start with easy walking and build capabilities incrementally.

The model to push impossible tech has worked... cars and rockets.

That's kind of the thing though...those took 26 bil in subsidies to generate 20 bil in revenue to duplicate existing tech (spacex def gets credit for reusable, obvi, but Tesla man, yuck)

I’m not sure about the numbers, was thinking about the model to progress technology rapidly.

The reusable rocket tech seems worth it alone.

Not to take anything away from the Neuralink team, but predicting joint movements and angles is about the edge case of what can be achieved with semi-invasive and non-invasive bci.

Recording from the nerves predicting joint movements in a steady gait is definitely already achievable.

It can be predicted with the same precision/throughput, better than left/right:1/0 once per second?

Can you share some link?

Is your hypothesis that there is nothing they could do that would both be not too far from what they have now, plus valuable?

I believe that Neuralink has potential to do great things. However, like many other Musk ventures, they vastly exaggerate their own accomplishments while downplaying remaining challenges. Most brain-machine interface advances will probably be made elsewhere.

I think that's just how progress gets made quickly. As Larry Page would say, "have a healthy disrespect for the impossible."

For what they are trying to solve for initially, we’re talking about people that cannot even move a finger.

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