From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak
Episode publishedPodcast: No Priors: Artificial Intellig...No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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The brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer. You can solve computational problems by arranging matter in a certain way and then like taking your hands off and pressing go. We talk about being a brain in a vat. That's what the skull is. Like the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves, these little cables that carry your interaction with the world. If you can get the visual signal, auditory signal, balance, motor, in and out of the brain, that is an end in itself. That is the central object. The retinal prosthesis ri
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Max Hodak, the founder and CEO of Science, formerly of Neuralink. We talk about Prima, the implant that helps people who have gone blind see again, which just got regulatory approval in Europe. Their quest to sustain the human experience and substrate independence for the brain. We also talk about alignable representations between AI models and the future of neuroscience. Welcome, Max. Max, thanks so much for doing this.
Thanks for having me.
So for anyone who is not familiar with science, can you just describe a little bit about, you know, why you started the company, leaving Neuralink, what the mission is?
Fundamentally, we're a medical device company. But I think if, like, the mission of lowercase s science is to use a differentiated understanding of the universe to improve the human condition, I mean, that's that's the mission of uppercase s science. That's what we do. We use, specifically an understanding of how to work with the brain to get big effect sizes that you don't get in medicine often. Our main product is a retinal prosthesis. You can think of it like a cochlear implant for the eye. Cochlear implants are some of the biggest impacts in all of medicine. I mean, you can if you've ever
And for people who are not familiar with that, it's a chip that's inserted with glasses.
It's it's a tiny chip that's implanted under the retina in the back of the eye for patients that have gone blind due to loss of the light sensitive cells in the eye. So specifically, this is diseases like macular degeneration, our clinical trial was done, and we're about to do studies in retinitis pigmentosa and Stargardt's and a couple of other diseases. So it is a chip that sits under the retina and then converts it to the patient, wears glasses that have a laser projector that projects an image onto the implant that then stimulates the retina to bypass the dead rods and cones and stimulate
How did you go from, we should have, like, a nick invasively in the brain to this particular form factor as the first premise?
Oh, so when we started the company, we had a couple ideas. The one of the ideas was the was the biohybrid neural interface direction, where instead of placing metal wires into the brain or genetically modifying the brain, what we do is we engraft in living neurons that grow it and form new biological connections. That's a big research project. It's very exciting research, but also, needed to be paired with another near term business. And we asked ourselves like, what was the most valuable thing we could do? We thought that we could restore vision to the blind with the resources available to us
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