Humanoid robots have just begun stepping into Amazon warehouses and Mercedes-Benz automotive factories. Now, they are being recruited for an even more ambitious effort – the creation of artificial general intelligence with capabilities comparable to those of humans.

US computing firm Nvidia, which has become one of the world’s most valuable companies through its AI chip sales, recently announced several hardware and software products to boost humanoid robot training. The centrepiece is a “moonshot” initiative, called Project…

Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company founded by Elon Musk, has revealed the identity of its first patient, who says the firm’s implant has “changed his life”. However, it is not yet clear with Nueralink has done anything beyond replicating existing research efforts, experts say.

Who is Neuralink’s first patient?

Musk announced in January that the first human patient had received a Neuralink implant, but little detail was released at the time. We now know – from a livestream video by the company – who that patient is and how the tests are going.

Noland Arbaugh explains in the video that an accident eight years ago dislocated his fourth and fifth vertebrae, making him a quadriplegic. He previously controlled his computer with a mouth interface, but he is shown moving the cursor by thought alone, apparently with his Neuralink implant.

“It just became intuitive for me to start imagining the cursor moving,” says Arbaugh in the video. “Basically, it was like using ‘the force’ on the cursor and I could get it to move wherever I wanted, just stare somewhere in the screen and it would move where I wanted it to, which was such a wild experience.”

He claims to have been using the device to read, learn languages and play computer games including chess, for up to eight hours at a time – at which point he needs to recharge the device. “It’s not perfect, we have run into some issues. But it has already changed my life,” he says.

What does the implant involve?

Neuralink did not respond to a request for interview, but the company’s website says that the current generation of coin-sized implant called N1 records neural activity through 1024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads that extend into the user’s brain. These are so fine that they need to be installed by a surgical robot.

In the live stream video Arbaugh says that he was released from hospital the day after the implant, and that the surgery was relatively simple process from his point of view.

The implant has small battery that is charged through the skin by an inductance charger and it communicates wirelessly with an app on a smartphone.

Does this mean the first human trial has worked?

Reinhold Scherer at the University of Essex, UK, says it’s too early to tell if Neuralink’s first human trial has been a success because the company “does not publish enough information to form an informed opinion”.

“While the video looks impressive and no doubt required a lot of hard R&D work to get to this stage, it’s unclear whether what’s been shown is new or groundbreaking,” he says. “Control looks to be stable, but most of the research and experiments they have showed so far are mainly replicating past research. Replication is good, but there are still major challenges ahead.”

Who else is working on brain implants?

Neuralink is far from the only group working on this idea. Many academic groups and commercial start-ups have already run human trials and succeeded in correctly interpreting brain signals into some kind of output.

One team at Stanford University in California placed two small sensors just under the surface of the brain of a man who was paralysed below the neck. Researchers were able to interpret the man’s brain signals when he thought of writing words with a pen on paper, and convert them into readable text on a computer.

When will Neuralink be commercially available and how much will it cost?

We are a long way from this being a commercial product, with lots of testing and accreditation ahead, so it is too early to tell. But Musk has made it clear that he intends to commercialise the technology. The first planned product has been named “Telepathy” and will allow users to control their phones and computers.

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What is Neuralink?

Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk, who also runs SpaceX, Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, to create brain-computer-interfaces: tiny chips implanted directly into the brain that allow people to communicate with computers by thought alone.

These devices could allow you to carry out simple tasks like searching for information or carrying out complex calculations with computers. They could theoretically also create technological telepathy, restore sight to people who are blind and enable paralysed people to control prostheses and regain their movement. Musk has said in the past that his company’s technology could allow humans to form “a sort of symbiosis” with AI.

What has Neuralink achieved so far?

Neuralink’s device is around the size of a coin and designed to be implanted beneath the skull, with tiny wires reaching a short distance into the brain to read neuron activity. The company has already run trials in pigs, and demonstrated that a monkey could play the classic video game Pong using the device. In May 2023, Neuralink said it had received approval for human tests.

According to a tweet by Musk, this trial is now taking place. An anonymous human subject received the implant on 28 January and is “recovering well”, said Musk. No other details of the trial have yet been released and Neuralink did not respond to New Scientist’s request for comment.

Has this been done before?

Musk’s company is far from the only group working on this idea. Many academic groups and commercial startups have already run human trials and succeeded in correctly interpreting brain signals into some kind of output.

One team from Stanford University placed two small sensors just under the surface of the brain of a man who was paralysed below the neck. Researchers were able to interpret the man’s brain signals when he thought of writing words with a pen on paper, and convert them into readable text on a computer.

Is the technology safe?

That’s what the trial is intended to discover. But previous animal experiments have not all been successful, according to reports.

In 2022 the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy organisation, sent a letter to the US Department of Agriculture requesting an investigation into what it called “apparent egregious violations of the Animal Welfare Act related to the treatment of monkeys used in invasive brain experiments.”

A Reuters report that same year cited documents and sources that indicated the company’s tests had killed 1500 animals, in some cases causing “needless suffering and deaths”.

Any device intended for human implantation will need to clear a number of regulatory hurdles to ensure that the device itself, the process of installation and its continued use is relatively safe and that any potential risks are well understood.

When will Neuralink be available and how much will it cost?

We’re a long way from this being a commercial product, with lots of testing and accreditation ahead, so it’s too early to tell. But Musk has made it clear that he intends to commercialise the technology. The first planned product has been named “Telepathy” and will allow users to control their phones and computers.

Tara Spires-Jones at the University of Edinburgh, UK, told the Science Media Centre that Neuralink has great potential and that numerous research groups are working on similar ideas.

“In recent research trials (not related to Neuralink), scientists have been able to implant brain-spine interfaces which help people with paralysis to walk, and other work shows promising results in computers interpreting brain waves and brain scans to allow people who can’t speak to communicate,” she said. “However, most of these interfaces require invasive neurosurgery and are still in experimental stages, thus it will likely be many years before they are commonly available.”

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A supercomputer capable of simulating, at full scale, the synapses of a human brain is set to boot up in Australia next year, in the hopes of understanding how our brains process massive amounts of information while consuming relatively little power.

The machine, known as DeepSouth, is being built by the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS) in Sydney, Australia, in partnership with two of the world’s biggest computer technology manufacturers,…

Balls of human brain cells linked to a computer have been used to perform a very basic form of speech recognition. The hope is that such systems will use far less energy for AI tasks than silicon chips.

“This is just proof-of-concept to show we can do the job,” says Feng Guo at Indiana University Bloomington. “We do have a long way to go.”

Brain organoids are lumps of nerve cells that form when stem cells are grown in certain conditions. “They are like mini-brains,” says Guo.

It takes two or three months to grow the organoids, which are a few millimetres wide and consist of as many as 100 million nerve cells, he says. Human brains contain around 100 billion nerve cells.

The organoids are then placed on top of a microelectrode array, which is used both to send electrical signals to the organoid and to detect when nerve cells fire in response. The team calls its system “Brainoware”.

New Scientist reported in March that Guo’s team had used this system to try to solve equations known as a Hénon map.

For the speech recognition task, the organoids had to learn to recognise the voice of one individual from a set of 240 audio clips of eight people pronouncing Japanese vowel sounds. The clips were sent to the organoids as sequences of signals arranged in spatial patterns.

The organoids’ initial responses had an accuracy of around 30 to 40 per cent, says Guo. After training sessions over two days, their accuracy rose to 70 to 80 per cent.

“We call this adaptive learning,” he says. If the organoids were exposed to a drug that stopped new connections forming between nerve cells, there was no improvement.

The training simply involved repeating the audio clips, and no form of feedback was provided to tell the organoids if they were right or wrong, says Guo. This is what is known in AI research as unsupervised learning.

There are two big challenges with conventional AI, says Guo. One is its high energy consumption. The other is the inherent limitations of silicon chips, such as their separation of information and processing.

Guo’s team is one of several groups exploring whether biocomputing using living nerve cells can help overcome these challenges. For instance, a company called Cortical Labs in Australia has been teaching brain cells how to play Pong, New Scientist revealed in 2021.

Titouan Parcollet at the University of Cambridge, who works on conventional speech recognition, doesn’t rule out a role for biocomputing in the long run.

“However, it might also be a mistake to think that we need something like the brain to achieve what deep learning is currently doing,” says Parcollet. “Current deep-learning models are actually much better than any brain on specific and targeted tasks.”

Guo and his team’s task is so simplified that it is only identifies who is speaking, not what the speech is, he says. “The results aren’t really promising from the speech recognition perspective.”

Even if the performance of Brainoware can be improved, another major issue with it is that the organoids can only be maintained for one or two months, says Guo. His team is working on extending this.

“If we want to harness the computation power of organoids for AI computing, we really need to address those limitations,” he says.

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Zubin Kanga describes himself as a pianist, composer and technologist. In his latest work, Cyborg Pianist, which premiered at Kings Place, London, he commissioned composers to create new works that fused cutting-edge technology with classical piano. Using technologies such as MiMu motion detection gloves, brainwave sensors and artificial intelligence, Kanga hopes to create a new repertoire for the classical piano and bring it into the 21st century. “We now have this capability of becoming these cyborg musicians”, he says, “and generate a new way of making music using these new technologies.”

Cyborg Pianist is available now on CD and digital

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Rodney Gorham, a 63-year-old Australian, has always been a music fan. In a recent WhatsApp conversation with New Scientist, he shared his thoughts on his most memorable live event – “AC/DC in their prime”. But more remarkable than that concert is the implant that allows Gorham to communicate even though he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which has paralysed much of his body and left him unable to speak.

The race to commercialise brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is gathering pace, and one company – Synchron – is leading …

An artificial intelligence has created a passable cover of a Pink Floyd song by analysing brain activity recorded while people listened to the original. The findings further our understanding of how we perceive sound and could eventually improve devices for people with speech difficulties.

Robert Knight at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues studied recordings from electrodes that had been surgically implanted onto the surface of 29 people’s brains to treat epilepsy.

The participants’ brain activity was recorded while they listened to Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 by Pink Floyd. By comparing the brain signals with the song, the researchers identified recordings from a subset of electrodes that were strongly linked to the pitch, melody, harmony and rhythm of the song.

They then trained an AI to learn links between brain activity and these musical components, excluding a 15-second segment of the song from the training data. The trained AI generated a prediction of the unseen song snippet based on the participants’ brain signals. The spectrogram – a visualisation of the audio waves – of the AI-generated clip was 43 per cent similar to the real song clip.

Here is the original song clip after some simple processing to enable a fair comparison with the AI-generated clip, which undergoes some degradation when converted from a spectrogram to audio:

And here is the clip generated by the AI:

The researchers identified an area of the brain within a region called the superior temporal gyrus that processed the rhythm of the guitar in the song. They also found that signals from the right hemisphere of the brain were more important for processing music than those from the left hemisphere, confirming results from previous studies.

By deepening our understanding of how the brain perceives music, the work could eventually help to improve devices that speak on behalf of people with speech difficulties, says Knight.

“For those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [a condition of the nervous system] or aphasia [a language condition], who struggle to speak, we’d like a device that really sounded like you are communicating with somebody in a human way,” he says. “Understanding how the brain represents the musical elements of speech, including tone and emotion, could make such devices sound less robotic.”

The invasive nature of the brain implants makes it unlikely that this procedure would be used for non-clinical applications, says Knight. However, other researchers have recently used AI to generate song clips from brain signals recorded using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

If AIs can use brain signals to reconstruct music that people are imagining, not just listening to, this approach could even be used to compose music, says Ludovic Bellier at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the study team.

As the technology progresses, AI-based recreations of songs using brain activity could raise questions around copyright infringement, depending on how similar the reconstruction is to the original music, says Jennifer Maisel at the law firm Rothwell Figg in Washington DC.

“The authorship question is really fascinating,” she says. “Would the person who records the brain activity be the author? Could the AI program itself be the author? The interesting thing is, the author may not be the person who’s listening to the song.”

Whether the person listening to the music owns the recreation could even depend on the brain regions involved, says Ceyhun Pehlivan at the law firm Linklaters in Madrid.

“Would it make any difference whether the sound originates from the non-creative part of the brain, such as the auditory cortex, instead of the frontal cortex that is responsible for creative thinking? It is likely that courts will need to assess such complex questions on a case-by-case basis,” he says.

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• artificial intelligence

Nematode worms given glowing shapes inside their bodies show how electronics can be directly 3D printed within a living organism. The technique could one day be used to create and maintain implants or computer-brain interfaces in humans.

Electronic implants are already widespread, from pacemakers to bionic ears, but inserting them into the body can risk infection and they can be difficult to fix if they malfunction.

Now, John Hardy at Lancaster University, UK, and his colleagues have developed a technique …