Thursday, October 15, 2026
RSS

Inside BCI

Brain-Computer Interface Industry News
Industry News Research Policy Opinion Market Moves
About Directory Glossary

Tag: Neuralink

12 articles

Market Moves

Chinese brain-computer interface job listings reach RMB 1.5 million a year

A Chinese developer of implanted brain-computer interfaces is advertising pay of up to RMB 1.5 million a year, about US$223,000, for FPGA experts and PhDs in automatic control, and up to RMB 1 million for neural signal decoding experts and neuroscience PhDs, in public job listings cited by the healthcare trade outlet VCBeat on 12 October 2026. Beijing's official 2026 talent catalogue puts the reference pay range for brain-computer interface roles at RMB 180,000 to 470,000, so the top listing is more than three times its upper end. Headhunter Bailie Talent puts the median company offer for neural signal algorithm engineers in the first half of 2026 at RMB 820,000. Companies say the hardest hires combine neuroscience, engineering and clinical experience, and that hiring has widened from research staff to include manufacturing, quality, regulatory and clinical roles. Chengdu ultrasound developer Gestala has hired a former Neuralink clinical partnerships lead and two former executives of Israel's Nano Retina. Tianjin University and Harbin Institute of Technology were among the first universities approved to offer China's new undergraduate major in brain-computer science and technology, with first students due in the 2026 autumn intake.

Oct 14

Industry News

Precision Neuroscience posts a 70-patient map of the human nervous system

Precision Neuroscience announced on 8 October 2026 a preprint, posted on bioRxiv on 1 October, that describes an atlas of the human central nervous system built from recordings in the first 70 patients fitted with its Layer 7 thin-film electrode array. The array sits on the surface of the brain and holds FDA 510(k) clearance for temporary use of less than 30 days. The atlas spans motor, sensory, language and auditory cortex, and also the brainstem and spinal cord, across more than 100,000 electrode placements. Precision says the total number of patients implanted with its system has now passed 100. Its chief science officer, Benjamin Rapoport, describes a whole-brain interface as a data milestone assembled across many patients, and its chief data and AI officer, Craig Mermel, says the company will soon say more about where the data meets artificial intelligence. The preprint has not been peer reviewed, and 16 of its 61 authors work for Precision.

Oct 9

Industry News

Neuralink cuts some implant users' calibration from 10 minutes a day to 10 minutes a week

Neuralink said on 1 October 2026 that participants in its clinical trial have streamed more than 50,000 hours of unlabelled brain recordings during everyday use of its implant, and that it has used participants' own recordings to pretrain participant-specific models that steady the software turning brain signals into cursor movement. Calibration had averaged 55 minutes a week across participants, typically 10 minutes at the start of each day; some participants now calibrate for 10 minutes a week. Six participants set personal bests on Neuralink's cursor test, and one reached 11.32 bits per second, which the company calls a record for a brain-computer interface. Every live result came from a model trained on a single participant's data, and models pooled across participants have not yet performed better. Neuralink's stated next goals are calibrating once, never calibrating, and a shared 'API for the motor cortex' for developers.

Oct 3

Industry News

Neuralink discloses direct thought-to-audio speech decoding in ALS participant Terry, the VOICE trial's third implantee

Neuralink published a video this week showing Terry, a married man with bulbar-onset ALS, saying 'Hello, how are you doing today?' and 'I, I love you' to his wife through an implanted N1 brain-computer interface. The output routed through Grok Voice, xAI's speech engine, using a clone of Terry's own pre-ALS recordings. It is Neuralink's most detailed publicly disclosed thought-to-speech demonstration to date and the first to route through xAI's Grok Voice engine for personalised voice synthesis. Another VOICE participant, Kenneth Shock, appeared in a Neuralink clip on 16 September 2026, two days before Terry's disclosure, saying 'I love you' to his wife. Terry is the third participant in Neuralink's VOICE early-feasibility trial (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07224256), formally titled 'VOICE: An Early Feasibility Study of a Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface for Communication Restoration.' VOICE is a separate protocol from Neuralink's PRIME motor-decoding trial and its CAN-PRIME and GB-PRIME international arms. The N1 implant holds an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation; it is not FDA-approved and not commercially available. Prior Neuralink participants Noland Arbaugh (PRIME P1), Alex (PRIME P2), and Brad Smith (PRIME first ALS participant) are on the motor decoding track. Brad Smith's earlier speech restoration used cursor-typed text through a cloned voice; Terry's demonstration is the first Neuralink disclosure of direct neural-to-audio decoding. Neuralink has not published words-per-minute, word-error-rate, latency, or vocabulary-size metrics. No peer-reviewed methods paper accompanies the demonstration.

Sep 23

Market Moves

Bill Ackman commits $400 million to a new brain research institute after his daughter's brain haemorrhage

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and designer Neri Oxman announced the Ackman Oxman Institute (AOI) on 19-20 August 2026, seeded with $400 million in Pershing Square Inc. stock and a stated further commitment of similar or greater size in a form other than Pershing Square stock. The institute focuses on brain research, rehabilitation, longevity, and human optimization, with Mount Sinai as an important clinical partner. Ackman cited Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Synchron, Science Corp and Nudge as examples of the BCI field the institute will engage with, without claiming direct equity in any of them.

Aug 22

Market Moves

The BCI category is broadening beyond motor restoration in 2026

Across the first half of 2026 and the first weeks of the second half, three US Food and Drug Administration Breakthrough Device Designations were granted to non-motor-indication BCI and neuromodulation devices, Cortigent's existing Breakthrough-designated visual cortical prosthesis programme disclosed a secondary stroke motor rehab arm, three first-in-human or investigational-device clinical milestones landed, and two significant peer-reviewed publications extended the field's clinical use case. The motor-restoration pipeline itself continued to expand in the same window. This is a synthesis piece on what the data pattern actually shows and does not show.

Jul 13

Industry News

Neuralink performs its first transdural implant on a Canadian ALS patient

Sgt Lee Marten of the Vancouver Police Department received a Neuralink N1 implant at Toronto Western Hospital on 20 May 2026, becoming the first Canadian ALS patient in the CAN-PRIME trial and the first human anywhere to receive the implant via Neuralink's new transdural surgical technique that preserves the dura rather than cutting it open. The story was broken by CBC News and MobiHealthNews on 2 July 2026.

Jul 4