Elon Musk’s secretive Neuralink has an event next week

Elon Musk is CEO of so many companies, it’s hard to keep track. So if you forgot about Neuralink, we won’t hold it against you. 

The secretive AI company, whose ultimate goal is to meld human mind with machine, was profiled in an (excruciatingly) detailed report by WaitButWhy’s Tim Urban in April 2017, and after that it was two years of (mostly) nothing.  

This will change Tuesday, July 16, as Neuralink is holding an event in San Francisco to “share a bit about what we’ve been working on the last two years.”

And the good news is that the event will be livestreamed, so the entire internet will be able to tune in. 

Beyond that tweet and this invite, the company shared no further details on what the event might be about. The company’s website is scarce as it’s ever been, consisting of a list of open positions at Neuralink, and a short description saying that the company “is developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” Even Musk himself, typically very talkative on Twitter, shared nothing beyond retweeting Neuralink’s tweet and Urban’s story from 2017. 

But the event might be a very interesting one, judging from Musk’s previous comments. In September 2018, Musk told Joe Rogan that Neuralink will have “something interesting to announce in a few months, that’s at least an order of magnitude better than anything else; probably better than anyone thinks is possible.” It’s been more than a few months since then, but it’s possible that this is the event Musk spoke about. 

Urban’s report from 2017 offered an extremely wide-ranging overview of what Neuralink is about but specifics on what the company is actually doing were mostly absent. Broadly speaking, Neuralink’s short-term goal was to bring “something” to market that could help with certain types of brain injuries. But the aim of this short-term goal (besides helping humanity) was to fund the long-term goal, which is to advance neural implant technology to the point where human brain would meld with a sort of artificial intelligence. 

Given Neuralink’s broad scope and general secrecy, it’s hard to say what, exactly, we’ll be hearing about Tuesday. But we’re quite sure it’ll be interesting.