And in the short term I can ask, you can interface with, uh, any given section of your brain and, and solve a tremendous number of things that, that cause debilitating issues for people.

So, so you wanna be able to read the signals from the brain.

You want to be able to, to write the signals.

Uh, you want to be able to ultimately do that for the entire brain.

Um, and then also extend that to, uh, communicating to the rest of your nervous system.

If there's a, if you have a sort of a severed spinal quarter neck, I've often said that prototypes are easy production is hard.

Um, it's really, I'd say 100 to 1000 times harder to go from go from prototype to a device that is safe, reliable, works under a wide range of circumstances is affordable.

Um, and done at scale were submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA and were, we think probably in about six months we should be able to have a first neuralink in a human.

So before we would even think of putting a device in an animal, we, we do everything we possibly can with rigorous bench bench top testing.

So we're not cavalier and putting devices into animals were extremely careful and uh, we, we always want the device whenever we do the implant, uh it's a sheep or a pig or monkey to be confirmatory.

Um not exploratory listen, since since the page demo, we've expanded to work with a troop of six monkeys, we've actually upgraded Pager.

Um They do very tasks.

Um and we do everything possible to ensure that that things are stable and replicable and things like that.

The device lasts for a long time without degradation.

And here you can see sake, it's one of other monkeys typing on a keyboard.

But now this is telepathic typing.

So to be clear, this is the he's not actually using a keyboard, he's moving the cursor with his mind uh to the highlighted key.

Now, technically, um uh can't can't actually spell and so I don't want to oversell this thing because that's that's the next version.

Um So the but what's really cool here is is um sake, the monkey is moving the mouse cursor using just his mind moving the cursor around to the highlighted key and then spelling out what we what we want.

Something that could be used for somebody who's who's say uh uh quadriplegic or paraplegic human um even before we make the spinal cord stuff work is being able to control a mouse cursor control the phone.

Um And we were confident that that uh someone who is has basically no other interface to the outside world would be able to uh control their phone better than someone who has working hands.

And I mentioned upgradability, upgradability is very important because our first production device will be much like an iPhone one and I'm pretty sure you would not want an iPhone one stuck in your head with the iPhone 14 is available.

Um so it's gonna be, it's uh um be able to demonstrate full reverse ability and upgradability, so you can remove the device and replace it with the latest version or if it stopped working for any reason, um replace it.

It's that's that's that's a fundamental uh requirement for the device at neuralink.

I think it's also important to show that um sake actually likes doing the demo um and it's not like strapped to the chair or anything.

So uh it's yeah, so um like our monkeys are pretty happy, you know, so you can see quick decision maker on the fruit front.

The first two applications we're gonna aim for in humans are restoring vision and uh I think this is like notable in that even if someone has never had vision ever, like they were born blind, we believe they can they can we can still restore vision.

Um so because the visual part of the visual part of the cortex is still still there and then the uh the other application being in the motor cortex where we would initially enable someone who uh has no ability, almost no ability to operate there, their muscles, you know, sort of like a sort of Stephen hawking type situation and enable them to operate their phone faster than someone who has working hands.

Um But then even obviously even better than that would be to bridge the connection.

Um So uh take out the signals from the motor cortex and um let's say somebody's got a broken neck.

Uh Then uh bridging those signals to neuralink device is located in the spinal cord.

We're confident there are no there are no physical limitations to enabling full body functionality.

How do you create a high bandwidth generalized interface to the brain?

So our first steps along these dimensions for our device is what we call the N.

One implant.

It's a size of about a quarter, and It has over 1000 channels that are capable of recording and stimulating its micro, fabricated on a flexible thin film arrays that we call threats.

It's fully implantable and wireless.

So no wires.

And after the surgery, the implant is under the skin and it is invisible.

It also has a battery that you can charge wirelessly and you can use it at home.

Unlike many consumer electronic devices which can simply offer a physical connector, charging a fully implantable device poses several unique challenges.

First, the system must operate over a wide charging volume without relying on magnets for perfect alignment.

The system must be robust to disturbance and complete quickly so as not to be overly burdensome.

However, most important is safety in contact with brain tissue.

The outer surface of the implant must not rise more than 2°C our current production charger which charges our current generation of implants, is implemented in an aluminum battery base which also includes the drive circuitry, a remote coil four times the size of our original device.

Also disconnect herbal this uh this remote coil has increased switching frequency, driving improved coil coupling.

I'd like to show you one of these applications here with the device we call our simple charger And the coil has been embedded into the habitat with the addition of one new outer control loop plus a banana smoothie pump.

The troop has been trained to charge themselves on the right.

Were streaming real time diagnostics from pages N one.

When he climbs up and sits below the coil, you can see the charger automatically detect his presence and transition from searching to charging.

We see the regulated power output on a scale of 0-1 and the current driven into this battery.

So, similarly for implanting our device safely into the brain, we built the surgical robot that we call the R.

One robot.

It's capable of maneuvering these tiny threats.

They're only on the order of a few red blood cells wide and inserting them reliably into a moving brain while avoiding vasculature.

It's quite good at doing this.

Um Reliably and in fact because we've never shown an end to an insertion of a robot in action.

Uh We're going to do a live demo of the robot doing surgery in our brain proxy.

So who wants to see some insertions?

So here it is, that's our R1 robot with our patient alpha who is lying comfortably on the patient bed.

This is what we call the targeting view.

So what you're seeing is this is a picture of our brain proxy.

And the pink represents the cortical surface that we want to insert our lectures into.

And the black represents the vasculature.

Is that we want to avoid?

And what you're seeing is this hash mark with numbers that represents where we intend to put each of our threats.

So this is another view real quick.

On the left is the view of the insertion area and on the right.

What the robot is going to do is it's going to peel the array.

Uh the threats one by one from silicon backing and inserted into the targets that we predetermine in the targeting view.

So there you go.

That's the first insertion.

So we're going to see a couple more insertions.

The whole process of inserting about 64 threads in our first product is going to be around 15 minutes for this robot to get an n.

One device is essentially these steps targeting.

And the incision drill the craniectomy, remove the tough outer layer called the Dura.

Then insert the thin flexible threads of electrodes placed the implant into the hole we created.

and then that's it.

You've got an implant under the skin.

The surgical robot does the threat insertion part of the surgery.

This is because it would be very difficult to do manually.

The rest of the surgery is done by the neurosurgeon.

There's still a lot for us to do to get to that procedure where we reduce the role of the neurosurgeon and make it affordable and accessible.

The primary, the two elements of the surgery that demand the most skills from the neurosurgeon are the craniectomy and the direct to me you've got to hear about the advancements we've made over the past year.

We've improved implant robustness, battery and charging performance, bluetooth usability, realistically every new device version is going to be significantly better.

We need to keep this new technology accessible for our early adopters.

This means that we need a solution to make device upgrade or replacement just as easy as it is to initially install.

We've explored many different avenues for designing around this healing process and finding a solution to make device upgrade seamless.

Our best successes have come from making the procedure less invasive instead of directly exposing the brain surface.

We instead keep the dura in place maintaining the body's natural protective barrier.

The same properties of the dura that make it a good protector of the brain.

Also make it really difficult for us to insert the threads into In humans, the door can be over a millimeter in thickness, which doesn't sound like a lot, but compared to our 40 micron needles, it actually is a lot.

For example, if you scaled up the needles to the size of a pencil, the dura would scale over four inches in thickness.

Take a look at how far you have to zoom in to even see it.

By the time the features of the needle come into frame, you can see individual red blood cells in the same frame.

One challenge is that we have to use the needle and the protective cannula that it sits in to grab onto the thread and to hold it while we peel it from this protective silicon backing and then we have to keep holding it while we bring it over to the surface and then release it from the cannula during insertions.

Another challenge is that the brain is really soft beneath the tough dura.

And so if the needle isn't sharp enough it'll just keep dimpling the surface without puncturing.

And if this free length gets too long, it can actually just buckle the needle like this.

Another challenge is that we don't just have to get the needle through.

We have to get the thread through as well.

So we really have to focus on optimizing the combined profile of the needle and thread together.

It's very typical for us to have our engineers who design also work on the physical manufacturing line to build and debug and this has been extremely, extremely critical in reducing our iteration, cycle time.

And we've also scaled up our surgery.

So we now have a dedicated our own O.

R.

In fact a double O.

R.

In Austin.

And this is just a stepping stone before we eventually build our own neuralink clinic.

So with this product, N one and R one, our initial goal is to help people with paralysis from complete spinal cord injury, regain their digital freedom by enabling them to use their devices as good as if not better than they could before the injury.

And as you mentioned over the last year, this has been the central focus of the company and we've been working very closely with the FDA to get approval and to launch our first in human clinical trial in the US, hopefully in the six in the next six months, the primary purpose of this update is recruiting.