An Elon Musk-backed startup looking to connect human brains to computers has raised most of its $51 million funding target.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Neuralink has raised $39 million of its planned $51 million funding round as per a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Prior funding rounds date back two years when the company raised $27 million after aiming for as much as $100 million.
While it's unclear what progress Neuralink has made in its technology, if any, the filings come less than a month after the SpaceX and Tesla CEO foreshadowed the startup's endeavors in an ambiguous tweet.
In a response on Twitter, Musk said Neuralink technology is 'coming soon.'
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Elon Musk believes humans must link up with machines in order to fight the inevitable onslaught of artificial intelligence. In a recent tweet, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO said technology from his latest company, Neuralink, will be 'coming soon'
In a new interview, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink will have the technology ready to merge human brains with machines 'within the next decade'
While many tech leaders push that AI will become invaluable to humanity, others argue it poses a threat to our species.
In November, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that efforts to make AI safe only have 'a five to 10 per cent chance of success.'
Musk made his comments in a talk to employees at his firm Neuralink, which is working on ways to implant technology into our brains, according to Rolling Stone.
He added that the employees should 'sleep well' after his warning, according to people close with the matter.
The warning came shortly after Musk claimed that regulation of AI is drastically needed because it's a 'fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation.'
In November last year, Musk told Axios that Neuralink technology would involve an 'electrode to neutron interface at a micro level.'
More specifically, it would be 'a chip and a bunch of tiny wires' that's implanted surgically into your skull.
'The long term aspiration with Neuralink would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence and to achieve a sort of democratization of intelligence, such that it is not monopolistically held in a purely digital form by governments and large corporations,' he said in the interview with Axios.
'I believe this can be done...It's probably on the order of a decade.'
Musk believes that humans will have to explore the cyborg-like technology as artificial intelligence continues to advance and become integrated into the products we use.
'Essentially, how do we ensure that the future constitutes the sum of the will of humanity?' Musk told Axios.
'If we have millions of people with a high bandwidth link to the AI extension of themselves it would make everyone hyper smart.'
He likened AI to 'digital intelligence' that could spiral out of control if we don't pay attention.
'As the algorithms and the hardware improve, that digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin,' Musk told Axios.
'...We're like children in a playground...We're not paying attention.'
