The literal quote you're responding to says that Synchron's implant is "less ambitious." It's worth noting that being overambitious is often the root cause of fuck ups.
...and world changing success.
I'm cheering this on from the sidelines, but I'm not advocating. Keep your metal and silicon out of my body, thanks.
> ...and world changing success.
But mostly fuck ups.
If you're successful, it was exactly the right amount of ambition.
I disagree. If you're trying to do, say, implement five revolutionary things no one's ever done all at once, so you can tell people you're going to go from zero to sci-fi in a couple years, there's an extremely high likelihood you're being overambitious. That's something that's obvious from the start.
The vast majority of people, including engineers and business leaders, are not Edisons or Telsas. Sometimes people get lucky or they have unusually well-resourced and competent teams to tackle an unusual amount of stuff at once. That's why I qualified my statement with "there's an extremely high likelihood..." Given Neuralink is facing "a federal probe and employee backlash" over shoddy practices, I highly doubt they have the unusually well-resourced and competent teams to not be overambitious.
On the one hand you seem to be arguing that neuralink is more complicated and has more unknowns, and that this explains why it needs to do more animal tests, but that depends on how much data one can capture in a single test. So it is not a given that the complexity-to-tests-needed graph is linear.
And assuming that we do actually capture a lot more data in a single test (I would hope so at least), then that also means more work needs to be done to interpret this data in a meaningful way and make improvements. Which would suggest that it should take more time to move on from one test to the next.
There is a difference between total animal tests and how quickly the tests are done.
They could certainly have done all these things serially, but it would have taken a lot longer. In the end, where they are is still far from a useful product - they have monkeys that can see phosphenes, they have electrodes that last 1 year, and they have a reasonable ASIC - but compared to the academic timescale, where we've been working on these individual pieces 1 PhD (6 years) at a time, they've made really remarkable progress.