For those who aren't familiar with Elon Musk's Neuralink, it is a company that focuses on manufacturing a sort of brain-machine interface that they aim to connect to the brain's very own soft tissue by using thousands of tiny wires.
The goal of this is to help with certain brain-related injuries like allowing paraplegics to get back their motor function, helping the blind see once again, or even helping out with anxiety. The device works well by implementing the help of algorithms in order to send voltages all the way back to the brain and also in turn receive certain voltages from the brain. This means that Neuralink aims to be able to read the brain and to write to it.
The report given to Stat News
Going behind the scenes of the company, things have actually been going a little bit rough. A particular report by Stat News gave away the truth of the existing internal conflict that has resided over the course of a couple of years. There is definitely a clash that is happening within the entire Neuralink corporation about how the company should actually be run.
On the outside, the company functions as a rapid-paced next-level-tech company but on the other hand, this company is actually a scientific research company that is burdening itself by waiting for the whole slow nature of scientific discovery in general.
Without much surprise, this has resulted into some friction within the company as four different employees who have asked to be kept anonymous stated in the report that the internal nature of the company was actually "chaotic" ever since its founding back in 2017.
The known Neuralink corporation has already lost a great deal of its founding scientists. The numbers have gone all the way from eight down to only three left. These include the leading experts as well as the rising stars in the entire brain machine interface research.
Academic scientists versus mechanical engineers
A former employee stated that they were actually building a particular medical device as well as surgical approach in order to implant the whole medical device using the company's next-level technology.
An example of the approach towards science through a more technological angle is what Neuralink did back in 2017 when the company actually pushed forward with a strong effort to implant a total of 10,000 electrodes on an actual array into a sheep's brain in just a single procedure.
The former employee exposed that this was how they approached it instead of actually trying to start off with a much smaller amount of electrodes but they chose the later and as a result, the experiment then failed.
The company admittedly had its share of internal strife where both mechanical engineers and academic neuroscientists had different thoughts of how the company should be run. The ex-employee then revealed that most of the time, Elon Musk would side with the engineers. It is important to note that although Elon Musk is the founder and majority owner of this company, the CEO is actually Jared Bertral.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
