A Look at Musk’s Neuralink and the Rivals Racing to Beat Him

[00:00:00] It's 4am and you're sucking baby snot through a tube because she's congested. If you love her that much, love her enough to make sure she's buckled in the right car seat. Find out more at nhtsa.gov slash the right seat.

[00:00:11] Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, July 26. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Google is putting the cookie jar back on the shelf.

[00:00:29] In a major reversal, Google is keeping the tracking technology in its Chrome browser. We'll tell you why it's scrapping a plan to eliminate third-party cookies and what it's doing instead. And then... Neuralink makes a brain-reading implant.

[00:00:44] It aims to help people with severe spinal cord injuries use computers and perhaps one day regain lost motor control. Our reporter Rolf Winkler is going to join us to explain how Neuralink's chip works and how it compares to devices from rivals.

[00:01:04] But first, for the past four years, Google's plan to eliminate cookies in its Chrome web browser hung over the $600 billion a year online advertising industry. Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world and the only major one that still supports cookies.

[00:01:22] But earlier this week, the tech giant decided to reverse course. Here to tell us about Google's new approach is our personal tech news editor, Shara Tipkin. So Shara, there are two different types of cookies. Remind us what they are. Yes. So there are first-party cookies.

[00:01:39] If you go to a website, you log in, that website can remember your login so you don't have to type it in every single time. Then there are third-party cookies and these typically track you around the internet.

[00:01:52] If you browse for shoes on one website and decide not to buy them, all of a sudden you're seeing ads for those shoes everywhere you go across the internet. Those are third-party cookies. So it's really third-party cookies that we're talking about here with this Google reversal.

[00:02:11] So what was Google's plan? Google was planning to get rid of these, to block them. We already see this in other web browsers like Safari, Firefox, Brave. They're already blocked. Google was also planning to block them, but there were concerns from advertisers that

[00:02:27] this would really limit their ability to advertise to us. That's partially why Google reversed on this decision and it's keeping them in Chrome, but it is going to make it easier for us to figure out how to turn them off if we want to.

[00:02:42] Okay, so how can Chrome users turn off third-party cookies? Today you can go to your privacy settings and just toggle them off. So there's three different settings you can choose from in Google Chrome.

[00:02:55] One of them is blocking them entirely, one of them is allowing them, and one of them is blocking them when you're using incognito mode. So that's the mode where it's like private browsing. You don't really expect to get tracked around the internet, but you actually can if you

[00:03:09] allow them at all times. What's probably going to happen is that Google in the future will show us a prompt when you go to Chrome that will say, do you want to block third-party cookies? You say yes or no, end of story.

[00:03:23] It's ultimately going to do the same thing, it's just going to be easier to get to versus having to go into your settings to figure out how to do it. What about other browsers that don't already block this if people want to block third-party cookies on them?

[00:03:35] Yeah, so the other major browser that doesn't automatically block all third-party cookies is Microsoft Edge. So for that you can go into your settings and there's several different kind of levels of permission. They can either totally block it or allow a different level of third-party cookies.

[00:03:54] It's complicated because some third-party cookies don't actually track you. They could help with maybe like remembering your PayPal login when you're actually on the Banana Republic site. So you just will have to look at the permissions to see what you're most comfortable with.

[00:04:10] That was our personal tech news editor, Shara Tipkin. Coming up, we'll tell you how Elon Musk's Neuralink wants to wire the human brain and about the rivals racing to beat him. That's after the break. It's 4 a.m. and you're sucking baby snot through a tube because she's congested.

[00:04:33] If you love her that much, love her enough to make sure she's buckled in the right car seat. Find out more at nhtsa.gov slash the right seat. Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council.

[00:04:49] In March, Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company Neuralink introduced its first human trial participant. Nolan Arbog, a quadriplegic who had the Neuralink chip implanted in January, showed the world how he could control a computer cursor with just his thoughts.

[00:05:07] An older brain implant from the company had similar capabilities to this fully implantable one, but could only be used in a lab. The company has raised over $600 million to invest in research. Here to tell us more about how the technology works and what it could mean for patients

[00:05:24] is our reporter Rolf Winkler. Rolf, describe for us Neuralink's demonstration with its first human patient. Well, the demonstration they showed, the first one was him playing chess with his thoughts. The Neuralink chip implanted in his brain was able to give him effectively mouse control over his device.

[00:05:45] He's quadriplegic, no function below his shoulders, but he can move a cursor left, right, up, down in full two-dimensional space and he can left click just like you can on a mouse. But there was a problem with the implant. What happened?

[00:06:00] Well, what's so interesting is that demonstration was mid-March, so about six, seven weeks after he'd gotten his implant near the end of January. At the end of February, the company had noticed that the data coming from the chip was declining.

[00:06:19] His control over a cursor, his ability to use the chip to interact with his devices was rapidly declining and they told him that what happened was threads that are attached to the chip that are actually inside his brain, they sew these threads into your brain, they

[00:06:36] relay data to the chip, broadcast it wirelessly to a computer, to the app, which turns it into cursor movements. Some of those threads inside his brain had come out, 85% of them. There are 64 threads attached to the chip and he told me that, the company told him

[00:06:54] that only 15% were still in there. And so for a time, they weren't sure what was going on, they weren't sure what they could do, but they were actually able to rescue his capabilities and with just those

[00:07:10] remaining threads, he was able to regain all the function that he had lost thanks to some clever machine learning. So what's next for Neuralink's testing? Participant number two, which if it hasn't happened is going to happen soon.

[00:07:26] If they got a green light from the FDA to proceed with their next participants after proposing fixes to that problem I described, they're going to, for instance, implant those threads a little bit deeper to try to prevent them from coming out.

[00:07:42] They're going to try to prevent air that gets into the skull. When you open up the skull, you drill a hole in there and you open it up, some air can get in there and that doesn't necessarily hurt anyone, but it may have destabilized the threads.

[00:07:53] So they're going to try to eliminate that as a problem. All right, let's talk through how this implant works. Where and how is the chip implanted? First they bore a hole about the size of a quarter above your motor cortex and a special

[00:08:09] surgical robot very quickly sews these threads into your brain and then the chip itself goes into that hole, fills it up, and then they cover you back up and you then have a wireless device inside your brain that captures analog data coming out of your brain.

[00:08:29] It's basically those threads have electrodes and they're listening for neurons firing around them. They record that, they relay it to the chip which digitizes it. The chip sends that digital information, your digital brainwaves via Bluetooth over the

[00:08:45] air to the Neuralink app on a computer which translates them into cursor movements, left clicks, etc. Other companies are building devices similar to this to help patients too. Let's talk a bit about what their approaches are, starting with Synchron.

[00:09:00] Synchron is using a stent-like device that it implants in a blood vessel on top of your brain so it doesn't go into the brain but it gets close so that it can at least listen to neurons firing.

[00:09:13] It has been shown to allow people to click and also to scroll. They can't quite do the full two-dimensional cursor control. What they can enable is more like if you remember the old iPods, the scroll wheel, and you can scroll up and down.

[00:09:30] They allow scrolling around a screen and you can stop and click on something. How about Paradromics? Paradromics is taking an approach that's sort of in between Neuralink and older technology that has enabled some of these abilities for a long time but not in a wireless fashion

[00:09:48] that you could take home. Paradromics basically has a small little chip with these tiny hair-like pieces of metal that would sit on top of your brain. You could maybe take four of these little devices and just put them on top of the brain

[00:10:04] and those little hair-like protrusions would go about a millimeter and a half down. Those would also be able to read brain signals to translate them similarly to the Neuralink device. They haven't tested theirs in humans yet.

[00:10:17] Precision Neuroscience is also building a product that sits on top of the brain. How does its device work? Imagine it's almost like this tapeworm-like thing that's very thin itself, thinner than a human hair with electrodes embedded inside it and they would just place it inside your

[00:10:34] skull on top of your brain so it doesn't actually penetrate the brain. Their pitch is this would be a less invasive surgery but still be able to read the brain signals that are necessary to read in order to enable device control.

[00:10:48] That's something that's sort of the different companies here are all wrestling with is what's the trade-off between the power of the signal you get from the brain versus the invasiveness of the surgery required to get their device to read that signal. That was our reporter Rolf Winkler.

[00:11:03] And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host Zoe Thomas. We had additional support this week from Melanie Roy and Tadeo Ruiz-Sandoval. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsop.

[00:11:20] Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muzlim. Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are the deputy editors. And Philana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.