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Neuralink Show & Tell Fall 2022 News Roundup [Live Coverage]

(Credit: Neuralink)

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Neuralink’s 2022 Show & Tell is about to begin. The event is supposed to update the public on Neuralink’s progress and attract talent to the company. 

Teslarati will be closely following the event. Please refresh this page for the latest coverage.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently posted about the event and hinted at an exciting update on Neuralink.

In the intro video of Neuralink’s Show and Tell event, Pager the monkey seems to be learning to type words with his mind.

Elon Musk enters the stage and welcomes everyone to the event. Wasting no time at all, Musk dives into Neuralink’s Show and Tell, starting with the company’s goals. Neuralink’s goal is to make a generalized I/O interface for the brain that could help people with debilitating conditions.

Musk hints that some of the topics covered during the event will reach an esoteric level. He reaffirms that Neuralink is confident that its device will help people suffering with brain injuries along the way to bridging the gap between computers and the human brain.

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“We are confident that this point we will succeed at solving many brain injury issues spine injury issues along the way,” he said.

Musk shows a video of Pager playing “Monkey Mind Pong.” The video was released about 18 months ago. The Tesla CEO emphasizes that Neuralink’s device is not outwardly obvious to others.

Pager initially learned to play Pong with a joystick. Neuralink later took the joystick away and had Pager play Pong with his mind though Neuralink’s device.

Human Trials

Musk reminds the audience that going from prototype to production is difficult and has many challenges. Neuralink has been working hard to start human trials. The company has submitted all the papers needed to start human trials to the FDA. Musk estimates that the first Neuralink device could be inside the human brain in 5-6 months.

Elon Musk emphasizes that Neuralink treats its animal subjects with respect. The company does extensive benchmark tests before implanting a Neuralink device into an animal.

Another Neuralink monkey, Sake, is typing with his brain. Sake spelled out the Neuralink event’s welcome tag: “Welcome to show and tell.”

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Neuralink Upgradeability

Both Sake and Pager have successfully implanted with Neuralink’s upgraded device.

“Upgradeability is very important because our first production device will be much like an iPhone 1 and pretty sure you would not want an iPhone 1 stuck in your head if the iPhone 14 is available,” Elon Musk.

Neuralink Application

Elon Musk says that Neuralink can restore vision, even on someone who was born blind. The company is also confident that the Neuralink device can restore full functionality to a severed spinal cord.

Recruitment

“If you have expertise in creating advanced devices, like watches and computers, then your abilities will be of great use in solving these problems,” Musk said.

Neuralink Implant and Surgical Robot

Elon Musk passes the baton to DJ, who has been at Neuralink since the beginning. DJ talks about creating a high bandwidth generalized interface to the brain. He talks about safety, scalability and access to brain regions, the three pillars to get high bandwidth generalized interface to the brain.

DJ talks about the Neuralink implant (the N1) with thin threads N1 implant is about the size of a quarter. It has 1,024 channels that are capable of recording and stimulating.

He also talks about Neuralink’s surgical robot (the R1 Robot) that will help implant the company’s device into the brain. Neuralink does a live demo of the R1 robot at work with dummy patient Alpha.

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Neuralink has a double operating room (OR) in Austin. The company plans to establish its own clinic in the future.

“Neuralink’s been working closely with the FDA to get approval to launch its first clinical human trial in the US hopefully in the next 6 months,” noted DJ.

Neuralink Software

Neuralink has been working on improving cursor speed and accuracy since 2021. The speed and accuracy has improved, but Neuralink is still working on improving it. The company is also working on a mouse and keyboard interfaces to work with Neuralink N1.

Neuralink is training monkeys to write so it can get rid of digital keyboards and increase the typing rate when patients use the N1 implant to write with their minds.

Neuralink N1 Charging

Neuralink has improved the battery of the N1 since its last event. The new charger is uses an Aluminum battery base with 6.78 MHz drive circuit for double the battery life.. Neuralink charges the N1 implant wirelessly.

Neuralink is working on a third generation charger with a bidirectional near field communication.

Neuralink N1 Development

N1 contains a small micro processor. Neuralink conducts hill tests on the N1. Testing became a bottleneck so the team created a new system, allowing it to rapidly test new hardware in the N1 implant, greatly accelerating its development.

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Neuralink has developed its own system to rigorously test its implant designs.

R1 Robot Development

Nueralink’s R1 robot will help neurosurgeons implant the N1 chip. As the company continues to improve the R1 robot, it will perform more of the surgery. Neuralink developer, Christine, explained that the R1 robot could make the N1 implant surgery more affordable in the future.

Neuralink Next Generation Application

Dan explains the Neuralink’s potential capability to restore eyesight. Neuralink inserted the N1 into the visual cortex of two monkeys named Code and Dash. By observing Code and Dash, Neuralink can record the receptive fields of their visual fields.

“Our goal will be to turn the lights on for someone who spent decades living in the dark,” said Dan.

After Dan, Joey comes up to talk about Neuralink’s application for people with severed spinal cords. Neuralink has conducted tests showing that it can stimulate movement in animals through multiple implants: the N1 in the brain and implants in the spinal cord.

Elon Musk comes back on stage joined by the Neuralink team to answer questions.

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Question Round

Elon Musk states that Neuralink does plan to provide some of its research and technology to research universities and hospitals after receiving FDA approval.

Musk says that Neuralink would consider open-sourcing its data sets. The company could publish them on its website.

Neuralink is working on making the electrode of the N1 implant smaller to prevent scar tissue and inflammation response.

Elon Musk hints that the N1 chip might be able to detect health conditions or monitor people’s health status in the future.

Neuralink is focusing on improving the longevity of the N1 device’s threads at the moment. However, the company appears determined to continue improving the N1 implant with no end date in sight.

Neuralink monkeys adapt and learn to utilize the N1 chip fairly quickly.

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“Right now we’re just guessing at a lot about what’s going on in the brain. But if you have direct I/O, there’s no more guessing. What we will learn about the brain with such a device–in wide use–is many orders of magnitude than we currently understand,” Musk said, ending the Neuralink event on that note.

Below is the link to the livestream. 

Maria--aka "M"-- is an experienced writer and book editor. She's written about several topics including health, tech, and politics. As a book editor, she's worked with authors who write Sci-Fi, Romance, and Dark Fantasy. M loves hearing from TESLARATI readers. If you have any tips or article ideas, contact her at maria@teslarati.com or via X, @Writer_01001101.

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Tesla Full Self-Driving becomes main pillar of new Referral Program

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla Full Self-Driving is now the centerpiece of the company’s newly revised Referral Program, which launched on October 29.

Instead of referring people to purchase vehicles and the referrer receiving $250 in Tesla Credit, the new program now incentivizes Full Self-Driving subscriptions.

If a Tesla owner is on an FSD trial and uses a referral code to subscribe to Full Self-Driving, the person whose Referral Link was used will receive one month of FSD (Supervised). Their code can be utilized 12 times per year, with January 1 marking the reset date.

Realistically, this means that if your Referral Code is used by 12 Tesla owners on an FSD trial, you will receive a full year of FSD for free.

The previous program made it pretty difficult to get referrals; buying a vehicle is obviously a much larger financial strain than subscribing to Full Self-Driving for a month.

Of course, the previous Referral Program also offered a tangible benefit: $250 in credits you could use on Service, Supercharging, or anything in the Tesla Shop. It truly could pay for someone’s travel for a year. It recently bought me a new backpack and a T-shirt.

However, this new program is much more attainable for those who do not have a massive online presence of a slew of friends in the Tesla community who will use the code and max out subscriptions for vehicle purchases.

The Full Self-Driving suite will now be the keystone of the Referral Program, which makes it more inclusive and more fun for everyone with an awesome benefit.

It also gives the impression that Tesla is truly focused on FSD subscriptions, something that saw a tremendous increase in volume in Q3, as 75 percent of deliveries for the quarter came with an FSD subscription attached.

Full Self-Driving data is so instrumental to the suite’s improvement that this kind of program benefits Tesla as much as it does the consumer.

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Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update

Tesla’s quiet mode reaches Model Y Robotaxis, blacking out the screen for riders wanting rest.

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Tesla’s quiet mode, the setting that blacks out the screen for riders who want to rest, has moved beyond the Cybercab. A video posted Thursday by Spencer (@scotsrule08) shows the feature running in a Model Y Robotaxi on a night ride that appears to be in Dallas.

The rider taps a small crescent moon icon in the bottom right corner of the map screen. The map, media player, app shortcuts and Grok prompt disappear, leaving a dark display with “Arriving soon,” the destination and a line reading “Tap display to exit quiet mode.” Controls a passenger may still need, including Pull Over, cabin temperature, volume and Support, stay visible. One tap anywhere brings the full map back.

Quiet mode first showed up in the Cybercab last week, which Teslarati reported alongside a new rear camera view. Tesla has been trimming cabin noise in other ways too. On October 25, Spencer reported that Robotaxi turn signals now chime for the first four blinks and then go silent. Tesla has not published release notes for either change.

Elon Musk has been pitching this use for more than a decade. In October 2014, he said that “maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination,”

By 2017 he was setting a higher bar. Speaking at TED, Musk said the hard part was not making self-driving work 99.9 percent of the time, “because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you’re probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn’t be, certainly.”

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Owners asked for something similar in their own cars. In December 2019, a Tesla owner requested a Nap Mode that would keep the climate running and wake the occupant with an alarm, and Musk answered “Ok,” as Teslarati covered at the time.

The line returned when the Cybercab was unveiled at the We, Robot event in October 2024. “We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving, where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said. On Tesla’s first quarter earnings call in April 2025, he called it the deciding measure: “The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year,”

Tesla has run driverless Model Y rides in Dallas and Houston since April, so a passenger dozing off on the way home is now a realistic use of the button. Tesla is also offering new riders a free first trip in both cities, according to an in-app screen shared by tracker Ethan McKanna, and said on its third quarter call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas next month.

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FCC green lights SpaceX’s move to a showdown with Verizon and AT&T

The FCC advanced plans opening 482 MHz to satellite phone service, boosting SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile.

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A hand holds a smartphone displaying the Starlink Mobile app interface showing a strong “Connected – Direct to Cell” signal, with a Starlink satellite beaming connectivity signals down to Earth from orbit. The background features the planet’s night side glowing with city lights against the curve of the atmosphere, set above a scenic twilight landscape.

The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to move forward with a proposal that would open an additional 482 MHz of spectrum to satellite service beamed directly to ordinary phones, a step that could widen the road for SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile to compete with the country’s largest wireless carriers.

The commission adopted the notice of proposed rulemaking at its October open meeting in Washington, Reuters reported. The proposal would raise the number of bands eligible for Supplemental Coverage from Space from five to 13, according to the FCC fact sheet. Commissioners also advanced a companion item proposing an auction of 25 MHz in the 1675 to 1695 MHz and 2020 to 2025 MHz bands, which could be used for terrestrial service, direct to device service or both.

Thursday’s vote does not hand any spectrum to SpaceX. It opens a public comment period, and final rules will come later. Under the draft, comments would be due 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register. The FCC had not released the adopted text at the time of writing, so it is not yet clear whether any bands were changed before the vote.

That question is where the fight now moves. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, through industry group CTIA, asked the FCC to drop the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands, which make up 290 MHz of the 482 MHz on the table, as Teslarati reported ahead of the vote. T-Mobile argued satellite interference could wipe out up to 96% of a cell site’s uplink coverage area. SpaceX asked the commission to go the other way and add the 902 to 928 MHz band.

The rule change that matters most to SpaceX may be a structural one. Today, a satellite operator must lease spectrum from every carrier holding co-channel licenses across an entire region such as the contiguous United States. The proposal would replace that with a certification that the operator has coexistence agreements covering only the areas it plans to serve, or that it holds the terrestrial licenses itself.

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SpaceX has spent this year building that second path. It bought EchoStar’s AWS-4 and H-block licenses in a deal worth roughly $17 billion, and earlier this month agreed to acquire Grain Management’s nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, which the company said would pave the way for Starlink to become a major US mobile carrier. The FCC approved SpaceX’s purchase of three unused AWS-3 licenses from Tristar on October 21, and cleared its plan for 15,000 next generation direct to cell satellites on October 6.

The regulator has not always sided with SpaceX. In April, the FCC dismissed a SpaceX petition seeking access to Mobile Satellite Service spectrum held by incumbents, and it rejected 2.5 GHz for satellite coverage when it first adopted the framework in 2024.

The carriers are also building their own defenses. In May, the three companies agreed in principle to form a joint venture pooling spectrum for satellite service, and T-Mobile remains SpaceX’s US launch partner for Starlink Mobile even as it leads the push to keep satellites out of 2.5 GHz. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said service on SpaceX’s own airwaves is targeted for early 2028.

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