Neura Pod – Neuralink

On this day, one year ago- October 27, 2025: Neuralink announced their first participant in the United Kingdom. Paul, who lives with motor neuron disease, received his implant at University College London Hospitals and was moving a computer cursor with his thoughts the day after surgery. "It was remarkable to see Paul using his brain-computer interface on the very first day after surgery," said UCLH neurosurgeon @WRMuirhead. One year later, Neuralink has implanted around 27+ participants worldwide.

Neuralink's "Blindsight" product is waiting for regulatory approval:

The Neuralink team works directly with human trial patients to learn useful feedback. This collaboration is important because every patient will have a similar, yet unique experience. Being able to articulate how something feels or operates is not something the monkeys can do. The team implements the feedback quickly, further demonstrating the impact these patients can have for future Neuralink users.

This is an extremely promising result from Neuralink: Early data from their VOICE speech restoration study shows a participant achieving 75 words per minute (WPM) on a 125,000 word vocabulary. For comparison, the average adult US citizen talks at around 150 WPM on a 40,000 word vocabulary. With future trial participants, Neuralink will leverage their scale to get more data about how the brain produces speech. In turn, this will improve this result enough to surpass able-bodied humans! Consider how meaningful this is- if Neuralink patients can output information from their brain faster than non-Neuralinked patients, they'll have a huge technology advantage. But they also mention a 5.8% word error rate (WER). This is an error every ~17 words. I asked Grok to give us a sense of how good/ bad this is: "In practical terms: - Under ~5–6% is generally considered excellent / high-quality performance (comparable to strong modern automatic speech recognition systems on clean audio). - It is highly usable for communication—listeners or readers can usually follow the meaning with only occasional corrections. - On a large 125k-word vocabulary this is especially notable, as bigger vocabularies normally make accuracy harder." More information about the study can be found in this thread:

Nick Wray, the 8th person in the world with a Neuralink implant has passed away due to ALS. For the time I knew him, he carried an optimistic energy that helped pick others up. One of his go-to sayings was: "Be good, do good. 😎" In support of his family and friends, we can all choose to live by that message every day. More information can be found in the link in Audrey's post:

💪 Nice to meet you in person.

Neuralink's third participant, Brad, now has his own Neuralink news series. ALS took his voice, so he puts together each episode of 'Neuralink This Week' using his implant and SuperIntelligence tools. Episode 1 covers Elon being listed as Neuralink's CEO in Tesla's latest proxy filing, Elon saying "Neuralink will help millions of people" after Jake shared his story, and a fact check on a viral Blindsight clip. Limitations start to disappear when you have Neuralink and rapidly advancing superintelligence!

Enjoyed this interview/ panel. Jake is a Neuralink patient with ALS. His life has changed a lot since he received the implant. He explains his experiences here:

Getting Your Voice Back Thanks to Neuralink 🗣️

Neuralink patient Zach is now able to control his robot vacuum cleaner (@maticrobots). Neuralink is building a brain-*machine* interface, and any digital device can be that *machine* part. Patients have demonstrated control of: - Computer mouses - Computer keyboards - Robotic arms - A remote-controlled airplane - Wheelchairs - and now a robotic vacuum cleaner Who will be the first to control a Tesla vehicle or a Tesla Optimus?

Why Hackers Won't Succeed in Controlling Neuralink Brain Chips

December 2021: "I think we have a chance with Neuralink of being able to restore full body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury. Meaning I think we have a chance- I emphasize, a chance, of being able to allow someone who cannot walk or use their arms to be able to walk again." - Elon Musk via @WSJ

The Brain Chip Before Neuralink:

Neuralink has logged over 50,000 hours of brain recording data. The very first patient (@ModdedQuad) accounts for nearly 10,000 of them. Imagine what happens as this brain data scales to billions of hours of detailed brain data. Neuralink will have a data pipeline that no other company will have.

Interesting, in many ways:

One of Neuralink's longer term goals is to help with detecting strokes, and perhaps even stroke recovery. The need for this continues to grow. 105 million people were living after a stroke in 2023, nearly double the 54.5 million in 1990, mostly because more people survive strokes and live longer. Elon named strokes in his 2020 list of conditions a Neuralink could one day help. Which would matter more to you after a stroke, getting movement back, or getting speech back?

There are many people around the world living with this horrible disease. Neuralink is not able to cure ALS, but they can dramatically improve the quality of life for these patients.

I've enjoyed these more and more each year. More people need to hear about the tremendous good Neuralink is doing!