Neuralink Corp., Elon Musk’s U.S.-based neurotechnology company, implanted a chip in its first human subject over the weekend.

“The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well,” Musk (pictured) tweeted today. “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” This is a milestone for the company, which hopes in the future that such chips will give people the ability to overcome some of their mental or physical disabilities — including returning sight to the blind.

Musk has said he wants to “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence” and to give disabled people “full body functionality.” The company has been testing on monkeys for years already, and despite Neuralink stating the animals were used in the “most humane and ethical way possible,” the sometimes-deadly chip experiments have been controversial.

Founded in 2017, Neuralink has been promising to apply its brain-computer interface, or BCI, to human subjects for years, but the journey to this point has been ponderous. In the past, Musk and his team talked about a robot described as “sewing machine-like” that will place minute threads into the brain and detect the activity of neurons, thereby connecting a person to a computer. Over the weekend, that happened when a human surgeon first removed part of the skull, and the company’s “R1″ robot carried out this “ultra-delicate” sewing.

Neuralink isn’t by itself working on such technology. The BCI industry is currently competitive, but Musk has the advantage of being a high-profile figure.

Never one to understate things, he says he hopes to employ such tech that comprises 16,000 electrodes, way more than anything that’s presently in development. The first version of the chip will include 1,024 electrodes.

At the end of 2022, Neuralink said human testing was only about six months away, having already prepared the necessary documents for the Food and Drug Administration. “The progress at first, particularly as it applies to humans, will seem perhaps agonizingly slow, but we are doing all of the things to bring it to scale in parallel,” Musk said at the time. “So, in theory, progress should be exponential.”

The company got its green light midway through 2023 and has since been bolstered with $280 million in new funding. That works out at about $640 million in funding since it was founded.

This first chip, according to Musk, is called Telepathy. It “enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking,” he explained on X. “Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.” Musk added, “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.”

Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr