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Comment by daniel_iversen | Hacker News Reader

What’s your thoughts of Elon’s NeuraLink? Also, do you have an opinion on whether good AI algorithms (like in the article) can help filter out or parse a lot of the noise?

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In my understanding, NeuraLink is just a research project thaf musk invested into and did some PR for. I wouldn't read into it more than that. Like any other similar BCI research project feel free to ignore it until papers are published. That is, unless you are involved in the field.

In my understanding it is a research project that has a lot more funding than others in the field and therefore it might be better positioned for a breakthrough. Am I mistaken?

Throwing a lot of money at one single approach doesn't validate that approach or make it magically successful. It gives one group of people the ability to try out more than just one idea (unlike typical grants that let you maybe work on 0.5-1.5 ideas at best). Sure, their second idea will be better than their first, but is their fourth idea still going to be better than their third?

Historically, throwing some money at a lot of approaches & different groups of people tends to yield better results in the long run (see cancer & AIDS research that have received a lot of funding in recent decades).

It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something you'd put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream. She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague memory in her, but she couldn't recall what it was. She asked the ship what it was, via her neural lace.

That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.

Excession, by Iain M. Banks.

The problem with using AI to filter and denoise is that the things we clearly know are unwanted noise are more quickly removed through other means (I can run the fully automated part of processing EEG data in under an hour with my code). The laborious part is quality control related to more subjective things that research is still figuring out what is important.

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