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Neuralink’s first human patient has become so adept at using the company’s brain implant that he can now beat other players at video games. On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s company provided a progress update on Noland Arbaugh, who received a brain implant in January that lets him remotely control the cursor on a laptop. In March, Neuralink revealed that Arbaugh was using the implant to play games including Chess, Civilization VI, and Mario Kart. In Wednesday’s update, the company reported that Arbaugh’s use of the implant has only improved over time. “The games I can play now are leaps and bounds better than previous ones. I’m beating my friends in games that as a quadriplegic I should not be beating them in,” he told Neuralink.
Arbaugh playing Mario Kart (Credit: Neuralink)
He’s also been using the implant constantly. In one recent week, he logged 69 hours, with 35 hours devoted to sessions with Neuralink and the other 34 hours focused on personal use, mostly during the weekend. One interesting development is that Arbaugh’s use of the implant improved even though “a number of threads retracted” from the chip. These threads are crucial since they contain electrodes that can detect neural signals, allowing the chip to convert them into cursor movement. The loss of the electrodes caused Neuralink to initially detect a drop in the implant performance for Arbaugh, which amounted to a decrease in “bits-per-second,” a measurement of his cursor control’s accuracy. However, the company was able to make some software refinements to produce “a rapid and sustained improvement in BPS, that has now superseded Noland’s initial performance,” Neuralink said.
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(Credit: Neuralink)
“He has subsequently achieved 8.0 BPS and is currently trying to beat scores of the Neuralink engineers using a mouse (~10 BPS),” the company added. Last weekend, Arbaugh also conducted a live stream on Twitter/X about calibrating and measuring the performance of the implant. This can involve trying to quickly click a small blinking icon in a grid, a process that’s repeated to gauge his BPS. Outside of his testing with Neuralink, he plans on holding more live-streaming sessions using the implant to play various PC games.
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Neuralink also noted: “Our current work is focused on pushing cursor control performance to the same level as that of able-bodied individuals, and on expanding functionality to include text entry. In the future we intend to extend the Link’s functionality to the physical world to enable control of robotic arms, wheelchairs, and other technologies that may help increase independence for people living with quadriplegia.”
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