Elon Musk’s Neuralink dazzled supporters this week when it revealed the first human patient to be implanted with its first product, in a video livestream of the perso moving a mouse and playing computer chess through a brain implant.
Noland Arbaugh, 29, is the the first person implanted with Neuralink’s “Telepathy,” a so-called brain-computer interface (BCI) that looks to help patients with severe paralysis control external technology — like a laptop or smartphone — using only neural signals. Arbaugh said he was released from the hospital the day after the procedure and has since been able to do things he wasn’t previously able to, including playing online chess and the video game Civilization VI.
“It’s not perfect, I would say that we have run into some issues,” Arbaugh said during the livestream on X, Musk’s social media site. “I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life.”
Musk later announced that Neuralink would also work on “Blindsight,” a product he said could cure blindness by beaming “direct vision to the brain.”
He added in another post that Blindsight has been tested and is working in monkeys, further claiming that “no monkey has died or been seriously injured” by a Neuralink device. More than a thousand animals were killed in the course of the startup’s rushed trials, which led to accusations of “grotesque” animal abuse and a lawsuit from a physicians group.
While Musk’s Neuralink is, by far, the most well-known BCI startup, it’s by no means the only one out there — and definitely not the first. Scientists have been studying BCI technology for decades, and dozens of people have been implanted with the brain chips.
Here are six of Neuralink’s brain chip rivals.