Elon Musk’s neuralink allowed a monkey to ‘play video games using his mind’

• Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company, has previously implanted a chip in an ape’s brain that allows it to “play video games using its mind.”
• Musk claimed it in a sweeping Clubhouse interview on Sunday night
• Neuralink focuses on human-computer interfaces for artificial intelligence in humans.
• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

Elon Musk’s human-computer interface company, Neuralink, appears to have got off to a good start.

“We already have a monkey with a wireless implant in its skull, and the tiny wires, which can play video games using its mind,” Musk said in a new interview.

“One of the things we’re trying to figure out is whether the monkeys can play Spirit ‘Pong’ with each other,” he told hosts The Good Time Show, a talk show hosted by Clubhouse. “That would be pretty cool.”

Neuralink has been testing neural interfaces on animals for years at this point. In a video released last year, Neuralink demonstrated its work on a pig named Gertrude.

In this video, Neuralink demonstrated its ability to record and potentially predict actions based on a wire chip implanted in Gertrude’s brain.

But according to Musk, the video game monkey was implanted with a wireless chip that allowed him to control an electronic interface with his mind alone.

“He’s not uncomfortable and he doesn’t look weird,” Musk said, “and you can’t even see where the neural implant went in.”

The wireless bit is especially important because it could eliminate the risk of infection from wires protruding from organic material.

“If you can experiment with something that doesn’t involve a thread going through the skin, it will improve animal welfare,” Newcastle University professor of neuroscience Andrew Jackson said last year.

Listen to the full interview here: