Musk promises sight to the blind: Neuralink's chip is ready

Elon Musk just made a loud promise about Neuralink. In an X post on the morning of October 30, he said the company's second product is called Blindsight and that it will let even people who are completely blind, or who have never seen at all, see. According to Musk, the device is ready from an engineering standpoint and is just waiting on regulatory approval. Within hours the post passed 2 million views and 40,000 likes.

The idea goes like this. A camera captures what's around the person, the image is sent wirelessly to an implant, and the implant stimulates the brain's visual cortex. The eyes and the optic nerve are left out of the loop entirely. That's why Neuralink talks about people blind from birth: what matters is that the visual part of the brain still works.

A few minutes earlier Musk reminded everyone about the first product, Telepathy. That's the implant paralyzed patients already use to control a computer with their thoughts. Musk promised that within a few years its output speed will beat the fastest human speech or typing.

Now for what the post doesn't say. Musk gave no timeline, no price and no technical details. In September 2024 the FDA, the US medical device regulator, gave Blindsight Breakthrough Device status. That speeds up the review but is not an approval. There are no public results showing Blindsight restoring sight in a human yet, and the company's own site still describes US trials as future studies.

Verdict: a miracle-level promise. We'll judge it by the first patient, not by a post on X.