Elon Musk claims Neuralink’s brain-computer chip can cure blindness

Elon Musk announced the next Neuralink product – Blindsight (literally – “Blind Sight”). This device is designed to restore vision. A few years ago, Elon Musk said that Neuralink would be able to restore sight to blind people.

“The first application we’re going to aim for in people is restoring vision, and even if someone never had vision, as if they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision. The visual cortex still exists. Even if they’ve never seen it before, we’re confident they can see it,” Musk said at the 2022 Neuralink Show & Tell.

“You want to be able to read brain signals. You want to be able to record signals. Ultimately, you want to be able to do this for the whole brain and then extend it to the rest of your nervous system if you have a spinal cord injury or a neck injury,” he added.

In November 2023, Elon Musk announced that Neuralink was working on a computer vision chip, but it would take several years to prepare. At the time, the company was focused on gaining regulatory approval for its first human trials. On March 20, 2024, Musk posted a short message on his social network account X about the company’s next product.

Musk later added that the Blindsight implant is already being tested on monkeys. “The [artificial vision] resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but could eventually exceed normal human vision,” Musk wrote in X, adding that no monkeys were killed or seriously injured by the Neuralink device.

In January of this year, the first paralyzed volunteer underwent surgery to install a Neuralink implant in his skull, which allowed him to learn to control the cursor on a laptop literally with his mind. The company this week published a video demonstrating the new physical capabilities the volunteer gained after this operation.