Brain-computer interface company Neuralink announced on 25 May that it has received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a clinical study in humans. Neuralink made the announcement on Twitter: "We are excited to share that we have received the FDA's approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study." The tweet said that the approval "represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people". The firm also said that the recruitment is not yet open for the trial, and it has yet to give any further details about what the trial will entail. Neuralink was formed in 2016 by Elon Musk and a group of scientists and engineers with the ultimate aim of making devices that interface with the human brain – both reading information from neurons as well as feeding information directly back into the brain.

June 2022 Around a year and a half ago, Yann LeCun realized he had it wrong. LeCun, who is chief scientist at Meta's AI lab and a professor at New York University, is one of the most influential AI researchers in the world. He had been trying to give machines a basic grasp of how the world works--a kind of common sense--by training neural networks to predict what was going to happen next in video clips of everyday events. But guessing future frames of a video pixel by pixel was just too complex. Now, after months figuring out what was missing, he has a bold new vision for the next generation of AI, which he thinks will one day give machines the common sense they need to navigate the world.

United States regulators have given approval for Elon Musk's start-up Neuralink to test its brain implants on people. Neuralink said on Thursday that it received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first human clinical study of implants which are intended to let the brain interface directly with computers. "We are excited to share that we have received the FDA's approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study," Neuralink said in a post on Twitter – which is owned by Musk. Neuralink prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have so far been implanted in the skulls of monkeys, demonstrations by the startup showed. With the help of a surgical robot, a piece of the skull is replaced with a Neuralink disk, and its wispy wires are strategically inserted into the brain, an early demonstration showed.

What use could healthcare have for someone who makes things up, can't keep a secret, doesn't really know anything, and, when speaking, simply fills in the next word based on what's come before? Lots, if that individual is the newest form of artificial intelligence, according to some of the biggest companies out there. Companies pushing the latest AI technology -- known as "generative AI" -- are piling on: Google and Microsoft want to bring types of so-called large language models to healthcare. Big firms that are familiar to folks in white coats -- but maybe less so to your average Joe and Jane -- are equally enthusiastic: Electronic medical records giants Epic and Oracle Cerner aren't far behind. The space is crowded with startups, too.

Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli, the CEO of Cooper University Health Care in New Jersey and an ER physician as well, spoke with Fox News Digital about how Nuance's AI tool is helping physicians focus more on patients and less on paperwork. Doctors in the U.S. spend an average of 1.84 hours per day completing electronic notes outside their regular work hours, recent studies have shown -- and 57% of them said documentation takes away from the time they can spend with patients. Aiming to change that, Nuance -- a Microsoft-owned artificial intelligence company in Massachusetts -- has created an AI tool for physicians called DAX, which streamlines the note-taking process. At Cooper University Health Care in New Jersey, doctors who are already using the tool have reported improved patient outcomes, greater efficiency and reduced costs. AI TOOL GIVES DOCTORS PERSONALIZED ALZHEIMER'S TREATMENT PLANS FOR DEMENTIA PATIENTS "For our physicians who use DAX more than half the time, they have seen a 43% reduction of the time they spend writing notes and an overall 21% reduction in the amount of time they spend in the electronic medical record," said Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli, the CEO of Cooper, which employs 150 physicians.

Chinese scientists claim to have designed a brain implant that allows a monkey to control a robotic arm using just its mind. Researchers at Nankai University shared the announcement on May 5, praising it as a breakthrough that will improve the lives of people with disabilities. The brain-computer transforms electroencephalogram (EEG) signals into the animal's control instructions to navigate the machine with food attached. The research has not been peer-reviewed, and the claims - which cannot be verified independently - are only available in a statement on the university's website. 'The trial was led by the team of Professor Duan Feng of Nankai University and jointly completed with the General Hospital of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (301 Hospital) and Shanghai Xinwei Medical Technology Co., Ltd,' the announcement reads.

A small but growing number of people in the US are receiving messages from their doctors drafted with the help of artificial intelligence – and some may not even know it. It is the first step in a larger plan to use OpenAI's large language models – the line of technology powering chatbots such as ChatGPT – within one of the largest US electronic health records systems operated by the company Epic.

The idea of someone using artificial intelligence to read your thoughts, arguably the only thing in human nature that is our own and inaccessible to anyone else, may make you shudder. Researchers at the University of Texas have published a study about a new system that can read thoughts and translate them into a continuous stream of text. The study explains how the authors trained a semantic decoder to make it capable of interpreting a subject's brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), while the person listened to or silently imagined stories and watched silent videos, to produce text that directly correlates to what was heard, thought, or watched. The decoder is a non-invasive system that learns from the brain activity measured with an fMRI scanner while the subject listens to hours of podcasts. This teaches the system to process and correlate the input data combined with the scanned brain activity, so it can learn to decode the person's future thoughts.

Have you ever struggled to describe something to your friend that you watched on TV last night? Soon, you might be able to project your mental images onto the big screen, as scientists have been doing so with mice. A team from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can interpret the rodents' brain signals. The algorithm, named CEBRA, was trained to map neural activity to specific frames in videos, so it could then predict and reconstruct what a mouse is looking at. The news comes shortly after researchers at the University of Texas at Austin used AI to turn people's thoughts into text in real-time.

It's probably a good idea to keep your opinions to yourself if your friend gets a terrible new haircut - but soon you might not get a choice. That's because scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have trained an artificial intelligence (AI) to read a person's mind and turn their innermost thoughts into text. Three study participants listened to stories while lying in an MRI machine, while an AI'decoder' analysed their brain activity. They were then asked to read a different story or make up their own, and the decoder could then turn the MRI data into text in real time. The breakthrough raises concerns about'mental privacy' as it could be the first step in being able to eavesdrop on others' thoughts.