Elon Musk has showed off his company Neuralink's brain-computer interface for the first time. In an announcement on 28 August, Neuralink unveiled prototypes of its device and showed off pigs with the devices implanted in their brains. The device resembles a coin with extremely thin wires coming from one side of it. It is designed to be implanted in the skull, with the wires embedded a few millimetres into the surface of the brain. Those wires can then detect when neurons are firing, or emit their own electrical signals to make the neurons fire.

Elon Musk's Neuralink is running into management challenges before it even ships a product. The Byte reports that Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak quietly left the company "a few weeks ago." He didn't say why he left the brain-machine interface firm, but said he was still a "huge cheerleader" for his former employer's work. Neuralink hasn't named a replacement. We've asked the company for comment.

Elon Musk's Nueralink will not be testing its brain implant on humans anytime soon - the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has rejected the company's application. The agency outlined dozens of issues the company must address before human testing, a critical milestone for final product approval, Neuralink staffers told Reuters. The concerns include the device's lithium battery; the potential for the implant s tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue, the employees said. Musk applied in early 2022, but staffers said the company co-founder has yet to solve all the problems - even though the billionaire revealed human trials would start in six months back in November. Three staffers said they were skeptical the company could quickly resolve the issues.

Elon Musk says his brain computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink is almost ready to start human trials, possibly by the middle of 2023. At an event that appeared to be another recruitment drive for Neuralink, Musk – chief of Tesla, Space X, and owner of Twitter – said the BCI startup could put one of its devices in a person's head in six months' time, meaning at some point in 2023. Musk previously hoped to have done that by 2020. Since 2017, the firm has been working on an interface to connect computers to brains, and in the mean time the startup has been testing its prototype hardware implant on monkeys. Neuralink is just one company exploring BCI computing, an emerging field made possible by medical technologies that make use of EEG and MRI to reveal the physical workings of the brain in action.

Elon Musk's secretive "brain-machine interface" startup, Neuralink, stepped out of the shadows on Tuesday evening, revealing its progress in creating a wireless implantable device that can – theoretically – read your mind. At an event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Musk touted the startup's achievements since he founded it in 2017 with the goal of staving off what he considers to be an "existential threat": artificial intelligence (AI) surpassing human intelligence. Two years later, Neuralink claims to have achieved major advances toward Musk's goal of having human and machine intelligence work in "symbiosis". Neurolink says it has designed very small "threads" – smaller than a human hair – that can be injected into the brain to detect the activity of neurons. It also says it has developed a robot to insert those threads in the brain, under the direction of a neurosurgeon.