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Elon Musk reveals details on Neuralink brain-computer with human housecat prevention plan

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9 years ago

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“I don’t love the idea of being [an artificial intelligence] house cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer.” – Elon Musk, Code Conference 2016

An AI layer to your brain, he means. Not happy with simply improving technology that’s only been around for the last century, innovative entrepreneur Elon Musk has his sights set on the way humans communicate, something that hasn’t been vastly improved on in over 50,000 years of evolution.

Musk has referred to something called “neural lace” several times recently, most notably at Vox Media’s Recode Code Conference in June 2016; however, not many details were known about how Musk envisioned this technology being implemented. You know, the Musk way of doing it. He suggested at the conference that he might be willing to tackle the challenge himself, and a few months later, teased a few times that he was in fact working on the idea.

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The announcement came in the form of a startup called Neuralink Corp, the initial details for which were originally reported by the Wall Street Journal. He seemed to have collected some impressive scientific minds and combined them with personal funding to initiate the company’s work. Other than speculation about what types of products could be created by the company and Musk’s initial idea of a direct interface with the brain’s cortex, not much information was available. More recently, a few more pixels were filled in on Musk’s vision.

Tim Urban of WaitButWhy.com, one of Musk’s preferred correspondent contacts (i.e., Internet writers), has been selected again as the person given the most in-depth information and access to Musk in order to publish a very detailed piece on what Musk has been up to.

Urban previously discussed and published details about Musk’s work on SpaceX’s vision for Mars and Tesla (with lots of direct access to Musk himself), and now has published a very long, yet very informative, piece on Musk’s NeuraLink company. He calls the company’s overall goal a “Wizard Hat”, and after seeing how much access Urban had to Musk and his new Neuralink team to gather information, that label is probably pretty accurate.

In Urban’s piece, he focuses on understanding what the business side of Neuralink will involve, as it’s the business models of Tesla and SpaceX which enable and drive their innovations. “We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years,” Musk is quoted as saying.

The incredibly complicated nature of the human brain, a multi-million year biology project in the making, unsurprisingly presents numerous challenges for scientists wanting to direct the flow of information into and out of it. Understanding all of the details of “how” the brain functions isn’t the challenge, though. It seems to come back down to engineering. As summarized by Urban, after some 1,000 interviews with multi-disciplinary (and amazing) science people, Musk put his team together and Neuralink Corp. was born to start working on it.

The first major challenge described in Urban’s piece is the concept of bandwidth, or rather, how many brain neurons (cells in the brain which essentially provide the 1’s and 0’s of brain signals) can be read by electrodes at a time. He quotes the Neuralink people as needing around a million neurons to be read in order to really achieve something revolutionary.

If you’re familiar with computer chips at all, the comparison to Moore’s Law is a decent metaphor here. According to this law, the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every 18 months, and this has led to computers becoming both smaller and faster. If you liken “transistors” to “electrodes”, you can see the engineering challenge for neural lace companies.

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Then there’s also the question of whether people are going to be willing to let their brains be voluntarily experimented with. Musk’s cult following might give him a trust advantage for seeking out willing participants, but skull surgery may turn out to be too much even for them. According to Tim Urban, the Neuralink team is acutely aware of this concern, and has thus made “non-invasive” implantation a huge focus for brain-interface technology to really take off. Also of issue is accessibility to the technology to make the implantation possible. In Urban’s discussions with him, Elon Musk likened the technology needed to what Lasik surgery machines do.

In summary, in order for Neuralink Corp. to achieve the innovative leap which will change the world forever with direct brain-interface technology (the “Wizard Hat”), they’ve got to make electrode manufacturing about as advanced as computer chip manufacturing, and they’ve got to be able to install whatever electrode device is developed into brains in a very non-invasive, automated way. Also, they will need to figure out brain-friendly WiFi, some serious miniaturization solutions, and develop a “neuron signal” to “human language” dictionary.

Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. [Yeah, that was sarcasm.]

Quite honestly, it’s not the medical procedure that concerns me, but rather the potential of not being able to block spam that has direct access to my brain. Between Minority Report and my daily email battles, yikes! Sure, there are already brain-implanted devices that solve problems; however, I think there’s a difference between correcting functions the brain is supposed to have and giving something unfiltered access to adding something that wasn’t already there. I can put my phone away if I don’t want to deal with a Twitter freak out deluge. I can’t exactly do that with my brain. You know, just saying. The WaitButWhy piece gave me even more reasons to worry, so I feel justified.

Tim Urban’s piece also detailed some pretty amazing things that could come out of the neural lace field that sound like science-based versions of telepathy and magic. The ultimate goal, though, was to enable human brains to be as functional as artificial intelligence in order to avoid all the pitfalls of superintelligent AI. Actually, to be a bit more clear on Elon Musk’s vision for all this brain-interface technology, he wants the interface to connect to a super-human-collective AI cloud which feels just as much a part of you as any other part of your brain does.

For instance, when you have a thought, you don’t consider which part of your brain’s anatomy created it. It just happens and you consider it a part of your being. Imagine a super computer as part of that “you” system, and congrats! You’re [kind of] getting where Musk is headed with Neuralink. Or at least that’s the long term goal of what he’s starting with the company. You know, kind of like the moving the baton forward thing he aimed for with SpaceX and getting to Mars.

I’m going to quote Urban on this, actually:

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He started Neuralink to accelerate our pace into the Wizard Era—into a world where he says that “everyone who wants to have this AI extension of themselves could have one, so there would be billions of individual human-AI symbiotes who, collectively, make decisions about the future.” A world where AI really could be of the people, by the people, for the people.

Where Neuralink will come down amongst current competitors already in the field (Facebook, Braintree, etc.) is obviously yet to be seen, but it’s yet another reminder that when Elon Musk says there’s a challenge needing to be solved, there’s a good chance he’s not going to wait for someone else to do it.

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Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

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3 days ago

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August 13, 2026

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

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The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

6 days ago

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August 10, 2026

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

Published

1 week ago

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August 7, 2026

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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