No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak
Episode Date: August 20, 2026Max Hodak, co-founder and CEO of Science.xyz, joins Sarah Guo to discuss the future of vision, brain-computer interfaces, and the human experience. Max explains how Science’s PRIMA retinal implant c...ould restore functional vision for people who have lost their sight, and why treating the brain as a computational system could unlock new approaches to medicine. They explore the broader potential of neural devices, from restoring lost capabilities to expanding human potential, as well as deeper questions around identity, consciousness, and whether the human experience can persist as our biological hardware changes. Max also shares Science’s long-term vision for reducing the fragility of the human condition by repairing, replacing, and ultimately upgrading parts of ourselves. Finally, he discusses the surprising parallels between AI models and biological brains, and why AI may offer a powerful new lens for understanding intelligence. Chapters: 00:00 – Cold Open Trailer 00:45 – Max Hodak Introduction 01:03 – Science Company Overview and Origin 01:57 – A Revolutionary Solve for Blindness 05:38 – Scope of Timeline and Engineer Cost 08:20 – Clinic Trial Process 09:01 - The Response from Clinicians 11:31 – Broader Biotech Landscape 14:59 – Max’s Interests in Biotech Discovery 16:45 – The Study of Consciousness 19:04 – Investments in Brain Computer Interface 21:21 – Fertile Ways to Study Neuroscience 23:54 – Biotech Expansion for Science Corporation 26:59 – What Success Looks Like in Neuroscience and Tech 28:14 - Goals Within Human Preservation vs. Adaptation 29:22 – Conclusion
Transcript
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The brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer.
You can solve computational problems by arranging matter in a certain way and then like taking
your hands off and pressing go.
We talk about being a brain and a vat.
That's what the skull is.
Like the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial
and spinal nerves, these little cables that carry your interaction with the world.
If you can get the visual signal, auditory signal, balance, motor in and out of the brain, that
isn't end in itself.
That is the central object.
The retinal prosthesis right now, I think, is a great proof of concept that we're on the right track.
Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a blind patient in this way.
We need to add depth of gray scale.
We think we could see a path to get at least red and green.
And so there's ways that we can compound upon this path through an engineering process to make a product that's better and better.
Hi, listeners.
Welcome back to No Priors.
Today I'm here with Max Hodak, the founder and CEO of Science.
formerly of NeurLink.
We talk about Prima, the implant that helps people who have gone blind see again,
which just got regulatory approval in Europe,
their quest to sustain the human experience
and substrate independence for the brain.
We also talk about alignable representations between AI models
and the future of neuroscience.
Welcome, Max.
Max, thanks so much for doing this.
Thanks for having me.
So for anyone who is not familiar with science,
can you just describe a little bit about
you know why you start the company leaving NeurLink what the mission is.
Fundamentally, we're a medical device company.
But I think if like the mission of lowercase science is to use a differentiated
understanding of the universe to improve the human condition, I mean, that's the mission
of uppercase science.
That's what we do.
We use specifically an understanding of how to work with the brain to get big effects
sizes that you don't get in medicine often.
Our main product is a retinal prosthesis.
You can think of it like a cochlear implant for the eye.
Cochlear implants are some of the biggest impacts in all of medicine.
I mean, if you've ever seen a video of a newborn turning on, turning it on for the first time, it's striking.
And our goal is to build things like that, including our prima retinal prosthesis.
And for people who are not familiar with that, it's a chip that's inserted with glasses.
So it's a tiny chip that's implanted under the retina in the back of the eye for patients that have gone blind due to loss of the light sensitive cells in the eye.
So specifically, this is diseases like macular degeneration,
which our clinical trial was done and we're about to do studies in retinitis pigmentosa and
Stargards and a couple of their diseases. So it is a chip that sits under the retina and then
converts it to the patient wears glasses that have a laser projector that projects an image onto the
implant that then stimulates the retina to bypass the dead rods and cones and stimulate the retin
directly to get a visual signal back into the brain. How did you go from, we should have like
a nick invasively in the brain to this particular form factor as the,
first premise.
Oh, so when we started the company, we had a couple ideas.
One of the ideas was the bio-hybrid neural interface direction, where instead of placing metal
wires into the brain or genetically modifying the brain, what we do is being grafted in living
neurons that grow in and form new biological connections.
That's a big research project.
It's very exciting research, but also needed to be paired with another near-term business.
and we asked ourselves, like, what was the most valuable thing we could do?
And we thought that we could restore vision to the blind with the resources available to us
and where the state of the field was in early 2021.
And so if you want to do that, we have to start from this understanding of like,
how does the brain get vision?
What is vision in the brain?
And you could look at the retina, which is obviously how vision gets into the brain,
the first place it's created.
The first stop of the optic nerve into the brain is a structure called the lateral genoculate
nucleus and the thalamus, so that you could think,
oh, we'll stimulate the LGN.
And the connection from there is visual cortex.
It's like it's half a billion cells up at the back of the brain.
And so if you want to restore vision, you can think I can go into the retina, I can go in through the thalamus, or I can go in through V1.
There's a bunch of scientific technical reasons that lead you to think if you have an optic nerve, you want to be in the retina.
And from there, you have a choice of do you stimulate?
There's two types of cells, and there's a couple different ways you could stimulate them.
And so we explored kind of all variants of that early on.
We developed an in-house gene therapy that affected the retina in one direction.
We did a survey of electrical stimulators.
We looked at ultrasound.
And what we ended up doing is we developed indigenously a state-of-the-art gene therapy,
which is probably going to humans next year, as well as we found the state of the art
out there in the world of people electrically stimulating the retina.
And there was a company in France called Pixium that back in.
late 2022 had by far the state of the artwork. It was originally developed by an inventor at Stanford
and then licensed to the small French company. And they were in the middle of clinical trials.
And we got to know them over course of a couple years and then we're in a position to acquire
them when we saw something that I think kind of nobody else really saw at the time.
And that, I mean, that deal has turned out to be great.
Can you talk about the recent CE designation regulatory approval?
you got? Yeah, so it took us about two years
post-acquisition to get it to the place where
this was possible, but we just
in July got marketing approval in Europe
for Prima to start commercially
selling it there. And so that's a major
milestone. That means it's really commercially available.
The first sales will happen in the coming weeks.
That's amazing. I think most people think of
anything in the BCI field as
a moonshot project
that may or maynate pan out 10 years
from now. Well, I mean, people forget that the moonshot
worked. We left
bootprints on the moon.
And so this comparison, I mean, I think that there's, it has gotten used in Silicon Valley to mean these things that have extremely long odds and are unlikely to work.
And therefore, we can vaporize a bunch of investor money just fine.
It's like, you know, when we went to the moon, we did it.
And so historically, the success rate of moonshots is higher than I think people give them credit for.
One of the most important things is having a real business here.
And this is the start of that.
Can I ask how you, when you were exploring both different signaling pathways and form factors and just.
conditions to go attack or how you thought about scope of timeline and engineering cost and risk?
Were you just looking for like the big enough to be useful and feasible in some period of time?
Or how does you think about funding the project and how long it could take?
So there's three elements to our pipeline.
The first is our working vision.
Second is our bio-hybrid neural interfaces.
And the third is that are working a different area of medicine, perfusion.
a program called Vessel, these three things together form kind of the minimum set of things
that I think if they're successful in the time scale of 10 to 15 years could really drive
I think a significant revolution in medicine broadly.
People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or
to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to help paralyze people move again.
Understanding the biology and the, like the biology and the,
molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult.
Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest.
On the other hand, the brain is a computer.
And when you deal with the brain as a computer, you get these things to work very, like,
it's just again, you don't see demonstration.
You don't see things in medicine like a cochlear implant being turned on or a deep brain
stimulator being turned on.
Or, I mean, you can implant a quadriplegic patient in motor cortex and have them playing
video games in like an hour.
Like this just, you just don't really see things like this in most drugs.
And so there's this, you know, in small molecule, random walk, you know, sifting in nature.
Yeah.
I mean, small molecules especially are super hard.
I mean, even, I mean, you can do some super highly engineered patient-specific car tea.
And instead, you get like an odd, like giant immune overreaction.
It's like if I put electrodes in M1, you will probably be using a computer in an hour.
And so it's just it's easier.
It's more amenable to biology in many ways.
You can do drug discovery for a decade, run a clinical trial.
you're going to turn over a card.
The answer might be no.
And then like what you'd like you everybody goes home.
Whereas here we have a clear sense of how to make the thing better.
The retinal prosthesis right now I think is a great proof of concept that we're on the right track.
Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a blind patient in this way.
But at the same time, it's it's a small field of view.
It's like looking through a straw.
It's only black and white.
We need to add depth of gray scale.
We think we see a path to get at least red and green.
Blue is a little bit trickier.
And so there's ways that we can compound upon this path through an engineering process to make a product that's better and better.
Can you talk a little bit about what you saw in the clinical trial in terms of variation between patients or what the ceiling was so far?
Yeah.
I mean, in the clinical trial, I mean, the main thing was just the existence proof of like that success was a possible outcome, right?
Like we had patients filling in Sudoku puzzles or crossword puzzles.
There were patients that were reading books.
And so I saw some of these videos, met with one of the patients, talked to the surgeons.
I mean, this is one of those things that seems too good to be true.
How did clinicians react to all of this?
Like, do, would the people that you work with, say at the beginning, like, yes, Max is right.
Like, the brain is a computer.
This should definitely work.
It should work at a higher likelihood.
and better rate of progression than our random walk in biological understanding.
Well, if you want to make people angry, you should tell the internet that the brain is a computer.
Okay.
We'll start by doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That kind of starts you off in a like a defensive place.
Why don't people like that?
I don't know.
This is one of those things.
This just feels like bike shutting to me.
I mean, to me, I don't mean that metaphorically, like the brain very literally, very clearly,
plainly is a computer in my understanding of the world.
I also view the universe generally as a computer.
computer, like, we can solve, like, you can solve computational problems by arranging matter
in a certain way and then, like, taking your hands off and letting and pressing go.
And so the fact that, like, that that unfolds in time to solve some computational problem,
I think of that as computer, the brain's the same thing.
And that, I don't think there's necessarily a deeper.
That's a broader definition of computer than I had before.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing special about transistors.
I mean, we understand computers in this idealized way as the, as like a touring machine.
that's an abstract computer.
It's just you're going from state to state
in ways that are subject to laws
that mean that the transformations are interesting and meaningful.
But no, I think this was fairly contrarian.
Both in the sense that BCI has this broader interpretation
than motor decoding,
as well as like is a retinal prosthesis of BCI.
That's also kind of this minor definitional question.
But if you think that it is,
than that opens up this interpretation of a lot of areas of medicine that could be accessible
to it that other people weren't really thinking about. I mean, clearly there was interest in
looking into this, like, that wasn't that contrarian. It's a different approach. I think we come
from a different culture than a lot of the conventional biotech industry. There's always been
kind of an East Coast, West Coast divide in biotech especially. And we are more of a tech
company than a conventional biotech company.
And our device view of a lot of historical biology problems makes us even more of a tech
company by biotech standards.
So we mostly raised from tech investors, not that much from biotech investors.
In fact, there's only one VC that I sought out at all at the Series A that I went to go pitch,
which was Bob Nelson, who's a biotech investor.
When you describe different types of BCI products and missions, I think you have a really good way
of explaining it that is, you know, on a spectrum.
Can you talk about just the landscape of what devices and approaches people are working on in BCI today?
Yeah, I mean, I think BCI is a category, kind of like how pharma is a category.
I think sometimes you talk to VCs and like, oh, we have a BCI bet.
Like, do you have a drug bet?
You made one bet on a drugs.
Like, that's how you think about the category.
Everything from...
Versus thinking about it like in, you know, neurodegene and Parkinson's or a specific condition.
Yeah, or maybe even different bets within neurodegener.
Maybe you've got a degrader and maybe you've got a gene therapy and maybe you've got something else.
Like because they're different hypotheses.
Yeah.
And similarly, I think on one end of the spectrum, you've got silent speech devices that may be BCI in a greater or lesser degree.
Like maybe they're recording a neural signal like EEG.
Maybe they're using something just like radar through the face, which I know.
Like it knows an idea out there.
But these are all basically hand substitutes.
And on the one hand, hands are great.
On the two hands, hands are great.
They work really well.
You don't need to think, I'll talk to teams that say like, oh, well, it'll be really nice
if to go to your next thing, you didn't have to open the Uber app and call an Uber.
You just thought of it.
It was there.
You probably want to communicate really unambiguously with the Uber app.
It would be pretty annoying if they just start like spontaneously getting notifications
during meetings that like, oh, it thought that you were thinking about an Uber, therefore
decided to summon two for you.
And so you'll probably want these to be pretty explicit.
And to the degree that that is a volitional intent, like, you know, you're not.
you already don't need to do a lot to get your hands to do things.
Now, could you have extra hands?
Extra hands famously useful.
And so having some easier way to communicate might be useful.
That is kind of outside of the scope of things I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Because if you get vision, hearing, balance, and a kilobit per second of motor control,
you're halfway to the matrix.
And this takes you into some like really trippy, reinterpret,
of medicine, and that's the stuff that we work on.
I think other people will do things like speech to text and AI communication.
There is a distinction, so there's a, let me come back to your broader question a second,
but there's some point where you go from communicating with a thing to redrawing the border around your brain.
And we don't have a great sense of exactly where that transition is yet, but there's a sense that there is one.
one. The way that you use the two hemispheres of your brain as one integrated bound thing
is different than the way that you talk to another person. And it's not just that there's
correlation because like all communication is about creating correlations between brains. When we
speak, there's big correlations that are being driven between our brains because there's,
I mean, all all communications is like premised on that. If we didn't pre-share a language or some
common education like some sense of math, then we wouldn't be able to communicate those concepts.
Because there's some thing that's lit up in my brain, I can serialize that to language,
can send that to you that lights up the same pre-shared concept spaces. And so there's one mode where
you've pre-shared some structure between the two brains, whether this is an AI model or a biological
brain, and then you're communicating over that channel. The other is you've added some new
structural capability. I think figuring out where that transition happens is a really like,
a really compelling area of research for us.
What are you most personally interested in in terms of exploring that boundary yourself?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that is it.
Like, what is you is a really central question here?
Like, if the end of the artificial intelligence quest is...
I don't really care.
What if I just want my brain to be a better computer or a richer one in terms of understanding
other people's experiences?
I mean, I think that you still...
There is an important question here.
So if I just like scanned your brain into a computer and,
there is a software simulation of you, is that, does that count as you?
Like, would that make you feel better about dying of cancer?
Like, if you were diagnosed with lung cancer, and so he said, okay, well, we'll scan you
into a computer.
So imagine that we do it like non-destructively.
So you're still there.
But then you're talking to the software replica of you.
And then you're like, okay, I'm going to go to hospice, but this thing will keep doing
my venture investing job.
Does that make you feel better that much?
Well, I think on this question, have you ever been under general anesthesia?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that produces a break there.
And this is the type of thing that you have to explain about.
Why does that feel different?
Because I think it does feel different.
I think that people are reticent to undergo general anesthesia, but they do it.
They survive and they realize it's fine.
And then there's, if I could make a copy of you and you can talk to that copy and you're like, okay, I will go away now.
I just don't think that many people are going to be like, this is it.
And so you have to answer why it's different.
There's an asymmetry in the, so you've got like some of the operators that actually change things in physics.
So like a creation or an annihilation operator.
And we get these in life, right?
You can create a new life or a new mind or new soul.
And then there are times when they can be annihilated, they can get destroyed.
And then there's ways that they kind of change while intact.
Do you study consciousness at science in a like a sequential way?
or directly explicitly today when you talk about the operators that are part of it, I'd say?
So your conscious moment is a, you're experiencing a bunch of things in parallel.
So you're seeing things and you're hearing things and you're feeling things and you're smelling things.
And these things happen just simultaneously together.
But they are kind of different elements of the experience.
And we want to understand how does the brain construct each of those and how does it cause them to be perceived together?
to the exclusion of other things like you have your vision and your hearing you never get my vision
in your hearing um and i like you kind of have this like you might think like that sounds like really
obvious like it's in my brain it's not in your brain but we need some more fundamental
explanation for really how that partitioning happens okay so you think that's a foundational
component yeah and so and yeah so i'm in the camp that like continuity is greatly important and so
people will accept significant drift in their identity over time as long as they have continuity
But if you preserve the sense of identity, like you have a software simulation that answers exactly like you would now, but it's not phenomenally continuous.
That is less satisfying.
Yeah, that's an interesting trade.
I think I would take dramatic morph but continuous experience.
Yeah.
I don't know if I'd take like significantly degraded IQ.
Laura Deming asked me this.
Yeah.
It's like life with provable characteristics is a thing we've never seen before.
And it might be, might be transient.
Like you probably accept degraded IQ for some period of time if it then got backfilled some number of weeks later.
you got some expense I mean at that point where you achieve subter independence you can
really you can take that almost anywhere you want which is why that's really really interesting
one of the big missing pieces here is connectomics that is getting to that is getting pretty close
I think in terms of to the point where the project could be done we're still relatively far from
a human connectome but I think we're not that far from a mouse connectome that would be enormously
useful for for like facilitating this research and understanding about how all this works
We need to understand, like, but even really basic questions, like, what is the overall
architecture of the brain?
We have some answer for, but I don't know that it's like a really, really detailed one at this
point.
You are of the view that it makes sense that there is this increased, like, interest, this
surge of investor interest and founder and engineer interest in BCI as a field given the progress
of AI model research, because the representations actually should be shared.
or they empirically seem to be.
Yeah, I mean, this is the idea called the platonic representation hypothesis.
And this is really interesting.
It is controversial in the community.
But, I mean, from where I sit, there's clearly something real happening.
So when you look inside these big AI models, the mathematical objects that you see look a lot like the things that you see in neuroscience.
So if you look at how do these AI models represent just like represent concepts, then you look at the parts of the brain that represent concepts.
You see these, you see very similar geometry.
That to me was one of the first clues, like when I really saw that, and we use that practically,
like we use that constructively at science.
We know that that is true because we can get alignments between animal brain neural
recordings and AI model internal representations.
That was a big clue to me that the AI was on the right track and this was like not a gimmick
and not hitting a wall.
There's like something deeper, deeper that's true here.
There's some fact about the universe where these things as they're learning or grabbing
on to some true underlying data manifold.
I mean, it feels like a law of physics.
Like, if you apply enough compute to matter,
you get this thing that looks like intelligence.
Why do you think that's controversial?
Or why is it in the field?
There's some faction of people that kind of don't want this to be true
for reasons that are not totally clear to me.
It is also not clear.
We don't completely,
we don't really fully understand
whatever phenomenon is happening here.
It's unclear if the structure is global
or if it's local in some sense
that in this, like,
There's, you can recover relational structures between ideas, but it might be that this, this works locally.
It doesn't like that where disconnected things might be placed.
Like this gets fairly technical quickly, but there's a bunch of stuff that we just don't know.
And I think this causes great space for people to wonder, is this as giving us this fundamental of like a hint as it might seem?
I think that it is.
What do you think are the most fertile ways to study neuroscience today if your set of beliefs is true?
Yeah. Well, I mean, ironically, it's probably working on AI.
Yeah, I have a couple of neuroscience friends at Open AI Anthropic who it's like, we joke to like, oh, you left neuroscience.
Like, no, no, no. It is just way easier to do neuroscience on the models.
But the degree to which it is neuroscience is fascinating.
I want to talk a little bit about the future in the maybe the very short and then the medium time scale.
for science short of, you know, changing the boundary of who we are.
So what does it look like to commercialize the first program for you?
You said that there need to be $100 million run rate businesses in this field.
How do you get there?
Yeah, well, I mean, becoming profitable or at least having the ability to do this forever is a super high priority.
Restoring vision to the blind is a pretty good business if you can actually do that.
Especially since almost everyone has the problem.
as an age-related problem.
Yeah, so AMD, it's like one and two have some early stage by 80.
It's like one in 10, 85 that I actually have it.
It is definitely a major issue and not just vision, but these topics in general affect everybody.
We don't have firm pricing yet.
This is a thing that we are being a little cautious about how we talk about publicly
because we aren't like totally sure yet.
But the precedents for vision are all, I mean, I think we can say they're expensive.
I mean, second site 10 years ago.
So there's a company about a decade ago that had a retinal prosthesis that works differently
than ours does.
It did not get the type of performance that Prima does, but was briefly approved because
again, there's really nothing for these patients.
There's always been a lot of enthusiasm for anything that could possibly help them.
And they didn't get what we call form vision.
They didn't get like a coherent, like face or like paragraph that that your eyes could scan over.
They got these flashes of light that patients could look at and kind of think about assembling into what they meant.
They got paid about $150,000 per patient in the mid-2010s.
There's a gene therapy that works that is only relevant in the first place for about 5% of patients in one narrow indication.
And it really doesn't work that well.
It gets a point one line to improvement.
and it kind of slows the right of degeneration for some patients.
That reimburses at almost half a million dollars per eye.
And so there's, I mean, some of this is a function of just how expensive it is to develop these therapies
and how high the failure rate has been historically.
And then some of it is that there's just, it is, I mean, vision's very dominant sense for us.
If you lose that, that's totally debilitating and restoring it is very important, even just like minimal vision.
So the Tam will grow over time.
For this first version, it's on this scale, like hundreds of thousands of patients in the U.S. and Europe.
So for the current version of Freeman, it's probably hundreds of thousands of patients.
And then the next version, which is going into animal studies now, will be in humans, hopefully next year.
We should expand that to millions.
You said something that surprised me as an intermediate point between vision and, you know, fully understanding consciousness.
how does oncology or other, like, how do other indications fit into the picture in terms of
what you might work on?
I mean, the thing that makes you, the only organ that you can't even in principle
transplant is the brain.
The heart, the pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're
really support characters.
They're there to keep the brain activity interesting and going.
And I think we're going to get to a point where because the biology is so difficult, I mean,
you've got this alien nanotechnology that is around us that we are like completely
surrounding us that we are completely dependent on that we understand still very poorly instead of needing
to solve that are there ways where we can accomplish the same fundamental goals you know like
using a toolbox that humanity is much more advanced in and so i'm going to be ultimately fairly
disappointed if i'm murdered by my pancreas and that i think that's that's the world view it's that the
thing that matters is the brain the brain is the computer is the computer and so i'm going to be ultimately
the computer that gives us this. You could not, we talk about being a brain in a vat or have like
these upload thought experiments, but you already, that's what the skull is. Like the brain is connected
to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves, the optic nerve
two, vestibular cochlear nerve that carries hearing imbalance is nerve eight. You've got these,
these little cables that carry your interaction with the world. That world is generated by the brain.
And so if you can get the visual signal, auditory signal, balance motor, like somatosensory motor,
in and out of the brain, that is an end in itself.
That is the central object.
And through a mix of the BCIs that allow you to kind of change the thing that it's interacting with
and our perfusion medicine program, we think that there's ways to significantly improve
not just lifespan, but health span
and kind of create a better
quality of life for many patients
in ways that I think will feel
kind of like a lateral move
rather than just solving many of the things
that people have seen on the horizon.
For people who are interested in working at
or investing in science,
if you are successful,
you know, what will be the change of the human experience
20 years from now besides you not worrying
about your pancreas as much?
Yeah, I mean,
that's it. Like, that's the, there's the, there's a sense, like a fragility that we all live,
like there's this jeopardy that we all live under as part of the human condition. And I think that
if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade. Like we will be,
we will just become much less fragile. We will have the ability to upgrade and replace parts
of ourselves. So neurodegeneration, we don't know about that one still seems that's still difficult.
That still needs like real investment. The two leading causes of death,
are cardiovascular disease and cancer not metastasides to the brain.
And I think both of those are going to be really attackable through this type of work.
The other extreme is if we are serious about exploring the universe and going to the stars,
we are going to have to adapt ourselves to that environment.
We're not going to export Earth with us everywhere we go.
And these bodies are great, but they're designed for this planet.
And it is going to be adapting ourselves to the hard vacuum space is definitely going to be
I think the thing that we want to do in the long run.
And ultimately, those are the same project.
Being able to preserve yourself and being able to adapt.
Swappable parts and substrate independence, yeah.
Yeah.
Substrate independence, I'll use that phrase.
The simplest premise for a company in the BCI domain today is like you can in some way,
invasively, non-invasively talk to an AI model in like a high bandwidth way.
That is not your focus of interest.
Why?
Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that talking or writing is thinking. I think this idea that there's the stuff that's just kind of preformed in your brain that if you could access it through BCI, it would be faster. It's probably not the case.
You don't think there's some special latent state that's not language.
No, I think that, but the, like it feels like you'll have, it'll feel like it's fully formed, but until you really sit down and try to write it out, it is it isn't really. And I think that feeling is misleading. And so there's this, there's this like 10 bit percent.
second kind of famous like cognitive bottleneck. There's this observation that the brain seems to
process information. There's a bunch of ways you can triangulate this. You can put somebody with
a perfect memory on a helicopter ride over Manhattan and asked them to draw what they saw.
And then you look at all the details. It works to about 10 bits per second over a course of an
hour or two. There's like a bunch of different independent lines of evidence for this.
So there's some deeply evolved cognitive bottleneck about that. I think that this kind of rolls up
through language. But even so, but even if you, if you take that, I probably, I mean, it probably
would be nice to be able to walk down the street with like a cap on and like ask questions to my
AI through monologue. Like that might be possible. There's probably some combination of EEG and
MEG that might be capable of this. That is still just like a different type of product. That is not
the thing we are trying. Like brain keyboard is, it might be valuable. It might turn out to be like
AR LEN-A-R glasses where it's just, our attention was already fully 100% occupied and
putting it on the face didn't really change that.
We were already consuming all the overall time.
But at the other end of that spectrum are things like generating vision or generating
hearing or achieving substrate independence.
Those are the things that we are focused on, not brain keyboard.
Both of these are potentially BCI problems or products, but very different type of companies that will build them, just as I think you have a huge range of drug companies.
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