Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

Classic HN middlebrow dismissal, only upvoted because people dislike Musk. Word error rate of 25% is unusable. Also it needs extensive retraining every few days. They used four fixed electrode arrays, like pushing a miniature bed of nails into your brain, which is far more invasive and less advanced than Neuralink's one device with threads individually implanted by robot. Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focusing more on general computer use. This is mostly about where the device is implanted, not the device's capabilities.

As for FSD, it leads by far for systems you can own, and while it is not as good as Waymo it is much cheaper and still rapidly improving. It is too early to say which approach will ultimately win.

The 25% error rate is for 100k+ vocabulary, it drops under 10% for smaller vocab. Meaningful bits per minute would be a better metric indeed.

I appreciate comments like yours that actually contribute to the debate. We need critical thinking and data. Not one-sided puff pieces out of context.

9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary is not that great either.

I have never seen stats showing that FSD is "rapidly improving". Quite the contrary, it seems hobbled by its backward hardware and plateaued in terms of progress.

I think the cognitive dissonance works like this.

"All the people I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice say that Elon Musk is wrong to disagree with them."

Elon Musk does something smart.

"No, Elon Musk did not do something smart. That's because only smart people do smart things. If he were smart, he would agree with the people that I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice. He must have cheated or lied or stole someone else's idea which also makes him not nice and not trustworthy. How can anyone support anything he does?"

"Oh look, someone on HN pointed out that Elon Musk did something smart. They must be not smart, not trustworthy and not nice just like all the other people who disagree with things the people I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice support. Here's a downvote!"

The backward hardware in my 2020 car has plateaued at driving me driveway-to-parking-lot on 100% of my drives in recent history. It’s a pretty nice plateau, really.

(I admit I’m mocking your wording; in fact it has not plateaued. Just every update makes things slightly smoother in non-safety-critical ways.)

> Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focusing more on general computer use. This is mostly about where the device is implanted, not the device's capabilities.

This is entirely ridiculous. There is no and will be no universal device that just works, and does different things depending on just where in the brain you happen to stick it.

Very nice of you to put everyone's lives at risk.