Elon Musk says Neuralink's second product, Blindsight, "is ready from an engineering standpoint. Just waiting on regulatory approval." Blindsight is meant to let people who are completely blind, including those who have never seen, see.
Approval status
Blindsight received Breakthrough Device Designation from the US Food and Drug Administration in September 2024. That designation speeds up review. It is not approval for commercial use.
Telepathy
Neuralink's first product, Telepathy, lets users control computers or communicate by thinking. Musk wrote: "Output bandwidth will vastly exceed the fastest human speech or typing in a few years." Neuralink runs clinical trials including the CAN-PRIME study in Canada.
What the hackathon produced
Neuralink engineers spent 72 hours working with a speech restoration study participant. Results included:
- Automatic detection of when a user intends to speak, so recording no longer has to be started and stopped by hand.
- iPhone call integration for Bloom, Neuralink's mobile speech app, so the other person on a call hears the generated speech.
- A prototype that starts a Grok agent when the user thinks "Hey Neuralink" followed by a task.
Musk also wrote: "Hopefully, in a few years, we will be able to shunt signals from the motor and sensory areas of the brain to the limbs and enable people to use their hands and walk again." Digital Trends stresses that restoring movement is a future possibility, not an established capability, and that Blindsight human trials are still being prepared.
