Elon Musk’s quest to wirelessly connect human brains with machines has run into a seemingly impossible obstacle, experts say. The company is now asking the public for help finding a solution.
Musk’s startup Neuralink, which is in the early stages of testing in human subjects, is pitched as a brain implant that will let people control computers and other devices using their thoughts. Some of Musk’s predictions for the technology include letting paralyzed people “walk again and use their arms normally.”
Turning brain signals into computer inputs means transmitting a lot of data very quickly. A problem for Neuralink is that the implant generates about 200 times more brain data per second than it can currently wirelessly transmit. Now, the company is seeking a new algorithm that can transmit this data in a smaller package — a process called compression — through a public challenge.
As a barebones web page announcing the Neuralink Compression Challenge posted on Thursday explains, “[greater than] 200x compression is needed.” The winning solution must also run in real time, and at low power.
Already solved by evolution. This is the same problem as all of us have with visual data. We’ve evolved to need much less data transfer by doing some image processing first. Same deal. Stick some processors in there so you only need to transfer processed results, not raw data
Why should we? What’s in it for us?
I mean damn bro helping humans potentially walk again is a pretty big “for us” thing if you think about it in terms of humankind and not just yourself. Like imagine if someone were trying to cure cancer with the help of the public and you’re all like “well what the fuck is in it for ME though?”
Imagine we all pooled our resources to fund medical research through taxes only for private companies to exploit the technology and jack up the prices…
A brain implant for rich people isn’t necessarily “for us”.
You can have a free “flamethrower” cigarette lighter. The company is bankrupt, and musk has a warehouse if the things he didn’t sell.
Nothing, but then you could patent it and license it to anyone but elon :) are you motivated yet?
Did they try middle out compression?
I’m not an Information Theory guy, but I am aware that, regardless of how clever one might hope to be, there is a theoretical limit on how compressed any given set of information could possibly be; and this is particularly true for the lossless compression demanded by this challenge.
Quote from the article:
The skepticism is well-founded, said Karl Martin, chief technology officer of data science company Integrate.ai. Martin’s PhD thesis at the University of Toronto focused on data compression and security.
Neuralink’s brainwave signals are compressible at ratios of around 2 to 1 and up to 7 to 1, he said in an email. But 200 to 1 “is far beyond what we expect to be the fundamental limit of possibility.”
I’m no expert in this subject either, but a theoretical limit could be beyond 200x - depending on the data.
For example, a basic compression approach is to use a lookup table that allows you to map large values to smaller lookup ids. So, if the possible data only contains 2 values: One consisting of 10,000 letter 'a’s. The other is 10,000 letter 'b’s. We can map the first to number 1 and the second to number 2. With this lookup in place, a compressed value of “12211” would uncompress to 50,000 characters. A 10,000x compression ratio. Extrapolate that example out and there is no theoretical maximum to the compression ratio.
But that’s when the data set is known and small. As the complexity grows, it does seem logical that a maximum limit would be introduced.
So, it might be possible to achieve 200x compression, but only if the complexity of the data set is below some threshold I’m not smart enough to calculate.
How do you send 200x as much data?
You don’t. The external system needs to run an approximation of the internal system, which the internal system will also run and only transmit differences.
There you go. Solved it. (By delegating to a new problem.)
Listen Elon, I have three words that will blow your mind: Middle out compression!
That’s a lot more civil than the three words I have for him.
Submit your algorithms under GPL
Just add 199 more transmistters
Did they try Stack overflow?
Why not skip the middle man and ask ChatGPT directly?
*GrokAI
You know, Xitter’s shittier AI.
Fair, I was thinking in the context of Stack Overflow.
Why would you ever want to do that?! Marked as duplicated. Shove a cactus up your ass.
Surprised they haven’t tried to train a neural network to find a compression algorithm specifically for their sort of data.
There’s a ridiculous irony in the fact they haven’t, and it’s still ironic even if they have and have thrown the idea out as a failure. Or a dystopian nightmare.
But if it is the latter, they might help save time and effort by telling “the public” what avenues have already failed, or that they don’t want purely AI-generated solutions. Someone’s bound to try it otherwise.
That isn’t at all their problem their problem is scar tissue buildup that they haven’t even bothered addressing. Wtf are they doing talking about data compression when they can’t even maintain connection.
There were rumors of that and a lot of other complications in the animal trials. I don’t think we ever got proof, but a lot of irregularities that were explained away. Could be a lot more problems coming.
I’ve got some of those bags you put your clothes in then seal with a vacuum cleaner, if that’s any use
