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Dec/2025

Dec/2025

Video: https://youtu.be/-1i4J0eubEk¹
Title: Can The Brain Merge With Artificial Intelligence? — With Max Hodak
Transcribed by: OpenAI Whisper via MacWhisper
Edited by: Gemini 3 Pro

Full transcript

Alex: Today we have seen that there is research that the brain-computer interface or the brain itself and the way that artificial intelligence works are actually a little bit more similar than we initially believed. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Max Hodak: Yeah, so there’s this, there’s this, been this really interesting drawing together that’s happening between what’s happening in the artificial intelligence community and what’s happening in neuroscience. I think when you look inside these AI models, there’s like if you think about what people were talking about a year or two ago when they were, they were much less sophisticated, they’re thinking, oh these things are glorified auto-completes or they’re kind of, they call them stochastic parrots, but that, that really does not seem to be the case. When you look inside these AI models, you see these mathematical objects that look a lot like what you see in, what you see in the brain in neuroscience. The representations are converging and this is an empirical finding, like there’s this, there’s an area of research, there’s a paper called the platonic representation hypothesis where it, there’s this empirical finding where different models, different architectures on different data sets converge to the same representations. And so this gives you the sense that these models are, are learning something kind of deep about the universe, that there’s this connecting thing that’s like a physical fact that if you train these big computational models, you get, you get these representations that produce intelligence and they’re the same things that the brain has figured out and so there’s this really interesting drawing together that, I don’t know, I mean I think it gives us a lot of reason to believe that the work in AI is on the right track.

Alex: So it’s important to digest what you just said, which is that there are similarities between the human brain and artificial intelligence, the way the models work today. Do you think one day we’ll be able to merge with AI?

Max Hodak: I think you have to kind of be specific about what that means but yeah, I mean one of the things that I’m preoccupied with is, is the binding problem with the, so all of your experience, I mean it’s important to realize that kind of all of this, like everything you see and hear and feel and think, like all of this is brain activity. Like that’s, at the end of the day that’s all it really is, like the brain is the thing that is you, it’s the source of, of your entire experience of the universe but within that it’s composed of billions of neurons that are distributed over a large area and spread out in time but you don’t experience the activity of these neurons independently, you experience a unified moment and even within your brain you’ve got two hemispheres, each of which is processing one half of your experience. So the left hemisphere is processing the right hemi field and vice versa but you don’t experience two hemi fields, you experience a single visual field and so how does that happen? There’s some physics that we don’t understand yet and if you could understand that then you can imagine adding, you can imagine building say a conscious machine, you could add a third hemisphere, you could connect this over the network, this would in some very fundamental sense allow you to redraw the border around the brain and change the, like where your brain ends and begins and in that sense where, where you begin and you end.

Alex: How far are we from being able to do that?

Max Hodak: I mean I think, next year? Probably not next year but I think within the next decade.

Alex: Wow.

Max Hodak: It’s very possible that this stuff is going to get figured out in a meaningful way. I think like 2035 will be a very, very different world than 2025. I think that the progress that’s happening in AI is much better known than any of this but it’s still not priced in and yeah I mean I think that there’s a big change that’s coming towards us over the next decade.

Alex: So what happens when we’re able to either connect with AI or even manipulate the brain using computing?

Max Hodak: Well when I think about the trajectory of BCI, so there’s on the one hand there’s very pragmatic near-term medical innovations that are coming to market now. So our lead program at Science is a retinal prosthesis, it’s a chip that’s implanted in the back of the eye. We just, we finished a major clinical trial last summer in age-related macular degeneration where patients that are unable to recognize faces have been able to read again. There was a major publication in the New England Journal of Medicine about a month ago, this was actually on the cover of Time last week and that is happening, that work is happening now but then when you look at the trajectory of the next decade I think it takes you to places that are kind of tough to talk about without kind of sounding like a lunatic.

Alex: But let’s do that.

Max Hodak: And yeah, I mean, the only organ that I really care about is the brain. You can get a heart transplant or a liver transplant, but you can’t, in concept, talk about getting a brain transplant.

I think the way that medicine might go is this: on the one hand, we have this toolbox of drug discovery in conventional medicine. On the other hand, you’ve got this toolbox of neural engineering, which I think is just empirically much more powerful.

If you look at the work in the retina, for example, people have been trying to restore vision to the blind for a long time, arguably for thousands of years. There are a bunch of drugs that have been developed. There’s a gene therapy that’s on the market that costs almost a million dollars a patient, and it doesn’t, first of all, it’s only applicable for like three percent of patients that have this type of blindness, and it also just doesn’t really work. Like it very marginally slows the rate of descent for a small number of patients.

Dealing with biology in terms of these molecular details is very challenging—humans just aren’t good at this. But the brain is an information processing organ. If you can think of it from the information perspective, the power of our retinal prosthesis is that we don’t really care why the rods and cones have died; we just care that we can get the visual information back into the brain, and then that can be reflected in the mind’s eye as a thing that you see.

This is just an approach where you put this in, and then these patients can read an entire eye chart, going from not being able to read any of it. One of the reasons that I like the neural engineering approach is it produces these very large effect sizes:

Cochlear implants really work if you’re deaf due to sensory neural hearing loss.
If you’ve ever seen a video of a Parkinson’s patient getting a DBS (deep brain stimulator) turned on, they go from being unable to hold a pencil to being very still.
What Neuralink has developed, where you’re able to put electrodes in motor cortex: in an hour or so after that patient starts to use that, they can play video games.

This produces effect sizes that you don’t see in medicine.

I think there’s a direction that this can go where you’ve got the brain, and if you can interface with the brain and keep that healthy, then you can get everything else done. The rest becomes swappable parts. I’m going to be pretty disappointed if I’m murdered by my heart or my pancreas, which, as far as I’m concerned, is basically a support function to keep the brain going.

Alex: So, if I’m hearing you correctly, what you’re saying is this could be: Brain-Computer Interfaces could be a science that develops in parallel with medicine, or maybe even exceeds medicine, and ends up playing into longevity because once you can manipulate, control, and enhance the brain, then we can maybe live longer lives.

Max Hodak: Yeah. The number one killer is cardiovascular disease; number two is cancer. We’ve made great progress on each of these, and you can find graphs online of how the mortality rate per 100,000 people falls over time. But still, the loss rate here remains 100%.

Curing cardiovascular disease, curing cancer—we don’t know how to do this. But it is possible that by connecting to the brain directly, you can just avoid the need to solve these problems in the first place. You don’t need to solve these hard problems if you can avoid them.

Alex: You talked about this a couple of times, and I’m going to give you a moment here to expand upon it because it’s actually remarkable what you just spoke about a couple minutes ago: that you’ve built a device called Prima that enables people who have had loss of sight to regain that sight. What happens? Do you stimulate the visual cortex?

Max Hodak: The first thing I’ll say is we were excited to bring this to market and we’ve been developing it, but it was originally invented at Stanford. We licensed it from an inventor, a professor at Stanford, who I think really deserves a lot of the credit for the central idea. But the results are amazing, and we’re really excited to bring this to more patients.

It doesn’t stimulate cortex directly.

If you want to restore vision to the brain, there are many reasons that people go blind:

Cataracts are easy to fix through surgery.
Retinal degenerations (like macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, or Stargardt’s disease) where the light-sensitive cells in the eye—the rods and cones—have died, but the brain knows how to see and the optic nerve is intact.
Diseases where the optic nerve has been lost (the most common of these is glaucoma, where high pressure in the eye can cause the optic nerve to degenerate; sometimes this can also happen through traumatic injuries).
Other kind of more rare diseases where the brain really never learned to see in the first place.

Prima is a tiny, little two-millimeter by two-millimeter chip that is implanted under the retina in the back of the eye. If you look at it under a microscope, it has all these little hex cells, and each one of these little pixels is essentially a solar panel.

It works in conjunction with glasses that are worn by the patient that have a camera that looks out at the world and a laser that projects into the eye to hit the implant in the infrared, which you can’t see. The laser hits the implant, and wherever the energy is absorbed, it stimulates—it creates an electric field.

In this sense, it acts essentially as an electronic photoreceptor. It bypasses the rods and cones to stimulate the next layer of cells in the retina called the bipolar cells.

In the retina, there are really three layers of cells:

150 million rods and cones
Connect to 100 million bipolar cells
Compresses down to 1.5 million optic nerve cells (this big cable that goes into the brain)

If you’ve lost the rods and cones, Prima will electrically stimulate the bipolar cells. This, empirically, was a finding of the clinical trial: if you do this in humans, they get an image in the mind’s eye—they can see it. We think that this is the right place to restore vision.

If you’ve lost the optic nerve, then you have a more challenging problem, but most of these patients haven’t. The bipolar cells are easier to work with because it is before this 100x compression. If you stimulate the optic nerve at that point, you’ve already compressed a lot of the visual information—like edges, color, relative motion—and you’d have to figure out how to encode that for the brain, and nobody knows how to do that right now. But we know that if you stimulate an image onto the bipolar cells, you get an image in the mind’s eye, and that works.

From the 1.5 million optic nerve cells, that eventually connects up to a quarter billion to half a billion cells in the visual cortex. That, in humans, is extremely difficult to stimulate. No one is—I mean, you get some flashes of light if you do that, but you don’t get structured form vision.

Alex: So about a year ago, I got a chance to sit with Nolan Arbaugh, he’s the first patient of Neuralink, a company that you co-founded. He’s quadriplegic, and since his accident eight or nine years ago now, he hadn’t been able to use a computer. He got the implant like you talked about, and, as you suggested, he started to be able to play video games. In fact, I played a video game against Nolan and he beat me.

Max Hodak: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. It’s amazing, yeah.

Alex: One of the things that he told me was that he was able to move faster than a typical human game player because, oftentimes, we have the intent to move, and then we move. We think about moving somewhere, and then maybe we press something on a joystick, and then it moves. But all he has to do is think about moving let’s say a cursor somewhere, and it’s there already. He told me that this has given him superpowers, and he could probably beat world-class video game players at some point because his ability to move is much faster.

As we continue to plug computing into the brain, where do you think that’s going to lead us? Do you think we’re going to create a new class of humans that have superpowers over the rest of us that don’t have brain-computer interfaces?

Max Hodak: I mean, I think it’s important—I mean, so first of all, that is extremely cool, and yes, it cuts a couple—like tens of milliseconds—off the connection from motor cortex out to the muscle.

It’s certainly possible. These are very serious brain surgeries. I think that it’s tough to imagine kind of healthy 30-year-olds getting these soon. But many, many people, as you age, the body fails, and many people eventually, I think, will become patients.

When I think about the next generation of BCI technologies that are on the horizon, that are getting developed, I think it’s very possible that in the next four or five years, there will be some patients who—maybe they had a stroke, maybe they had some other injury—who kind of go from “this terrible thing happened” that in retrospect kind of became like “this amazing opportunity.”

It’s a little tough to imagine, but yeah, I mean, these things are going to substantially change the world.

Alex: We have about a minute left. This is one of those technologies, maybe similar to AI, that has a lot of buzz, but then you ask, “Okay, well, where’s the business plan going to be?” and we sort of stop to think for a bit and say, “How’s that exactly going to work, and is it just going to drive insurance costs higher?” So what’s your perspective on how to make this a profitable business?

Max Hodak: Oh, man, I don’t know if we can manage this in a minute, but in the near term, for all of the BCI labs, these are medical devices that will be reimbursed by payers and these are for serious medical diseases.

But I think that this is—I mean, there’s a deeper tension here in healthcare. As time goes on, and there are more technologies that produce better outcomes for more people and allow them to have higher qualities of life for longer, there’s just more stuff to spend money on. But healthcare is kind of fundamentally this fixed bucket of money that increases very slowly.

Twenty years ago, phones and computers were like—they’ve fallen in price by almost 90% over this time, but we spend ten times plus more on them. And this is a great thing.
But if we had new technologies that meant that we could spend ten times as much on healthcare, this would be a catastrophe.

So I think solving that—as these technologies really improve and we are really able to extend life and improve it for many decades—this is going to be—there’s going to be some kind of reckoning in healthcare.

Alex: Well, it’s a fascinating new frontier. I’ve called 2025 the year of the brain-computer interface, and as I watch the progress from companies like yours, I’m feeling really good about that assessment that came in before the year. So Max, thank you so much.

Max Hodak: Thanks.

Alex: Thank you, everybody.

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https://youtu.be/-1i4J0eubEk