Man Battling ALS Becomes First Non-Verbal Patient To Receive Elon Musk's Neuralink Brain Implant

A man has become the first non-verbal, as well as only the third person ever, to receive a Neuralink Brain-Chip Interface (BCI) implant.

What Happened: Author Bradford G Smith suffers from ALS or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a very rare nervous system disease that severely impacts motor functions. Smith released a video on the social media platform X to share the update on Sunday.

Smith says that he uses the Neuralink implant to control the cursor on his laptop as well as Grok AI to create a clone of his own voice to speak. The video Smith shared was also edited by the BCI chip.

Why It Matters: The news comes as Elon Musk has touted his Neuralink BCI as technology that will help completely blind people see again, the billionaire shared.  

Musk also reiterated that robots would outperform human surgeons in almost 5 years. He said Neuralink "had to use a robot for the brain-computer electrode insertion, as it was impossible for a human to achieve the required speed and precision."

Elsewhere, Neuralink is also eyeing an $8.5 billion pre-money valuation in its latest round of funding as the company aims to raise over $500 million, in ongoing talks with investors.

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