Image: Neuralink
Elon Musk says Neuralink’s Blindsight implant is ready from an engineering standpoint and is only waiting on regulators before it can help people who are completely blind, or who have never seen, regain vision.
In an October 29 post on X, Musk described Blindsight as Neuralink’s second product and wrote that it will “enable even those who are completely blind or have never seen to see,” adding: “It is ready from an engineering standpoint. Just waiting on regulatory approval.”
Minutes earlier, Musk framed Telepathy as Neuralink’s first product. He said it enables high-speed communication with computers or humans simply by thinking, and that “output bandwidth will vastly exceed the fastest human speech or typing in a few years.”
Blindsight already cleared an early FDA hurdle. Neuralink said on September 17, 2024, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted the program Breakthrough Device Designation for people with vision impairment, a step meant to speed review of devices for serious conditions.
Speech work has been moving in parallel on the Telepathy side. Neuralink recently said one ALS participant hit 75 words a minute in week one of speech restoration work, after earlier clips of patients using thought-to-speech systems with Grok Voice.
Cursor and decoding research is advancing too. In early October, Neuralink said it had pretrained neural encoders on more than 50,000 hours of brain data from clinical trial participants, cutting calibration time and raising bit-rate records for its brain-computer interface.
Will regulators clear Blindsight next, or will Telepathy hit that speech-beating bandwidth first?
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