Max Hodak
Co-founder & CEO, Science Corporation. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@maxhodak_ ↗maxhodak.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Max Hodak is the co-founder and CEO of Science Corporation, a neural engineering company developing the PRIMA retinal implant. He previously co-founded Neuralink and served as its president until 2021.
3shows
3appearances
75statements
24resolved
18supported
4contradicted
75%fully supported
Everything Max Hodak said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hodak: Critics who call AI stochastic parrots do not understand AI
“The whole idea, like there's these things that are like stochastic parrots or glorified autocompletes, like these people just don't know what they're talking about.”
Hodak: Humans who will live to 1,000 are likely alive today
“I think it is very possible that the first people to live to a thousand are alive right now. And I think it might be many more people than you think. It's not gonna be like one or two people on earth today.”
Hodak: Science is the first to restore form vision in blind patients
“Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a blind patient in this way.”
Hodak: Vision, hearing, balance, and 1 kbps motor control unlock radical neurotech
“If you can, if you get vision, hearing, balance, and a kilobit per second of motor control, you're halfway to the matrix. And this takes you into some like really trippy interpret reinterpretations of medicine.”
Hodak: Science aligns animal brain recordings with AI model representations
“We use that constructively at science like that. So we know that that is. That is true because we can get alignments between animal brain neural recordings and AI model internal representations.”
Hodak: Cardiovascular disease and non-brain cancer are attackable via organ replacement
“The two leading causes of death though, are cardiovascular disease and cancer is not metastasized to the brain. And I think both of those are going to be really attackable through this type of work.”
Hodak: Ultrasound BCIs could enable digital Ambien or digital Adderall
“One of the things that I think will be possible with ultrasound is like a digital Ambien or like a digital Adderall. So can you like stimulate part of the brain to cause focus or sleep and things like that? Would not surprise me if that was possible. And that …”
Hodak: Restorative BCIs will eventually surpass baseline human capabilities
“My view on this is not that I think healthy, 30 year olds are going to be getting these soon, but eventually many people become patients. Aging is like the correlate of kind of everything getting worse. And so there's some critical age where it kind of crosses…”
Hodak: BCIs will achieve native 20/20 vision and color within 10 years
“I mean, I do think that you can get to close to native acuity, so kind of like your normal twenty-twenty vision. We're definitely not there yet, but I see a path to get there and be able to get Color and fill in a lot of the field of view. To be clear that it'…”
Hodak: BCI progress is limited by hardware, not neuroscience complexity
“Brain-computer interface research and development is limited by your ability to record and stimulate these signals. The neuroscience, comparatively, is actually pretty simple. As soon as you can record the signals, we've very quickly figured out what, we talk …”
Hodak: The ultimate end of brain-computer interfaces is conscious machines
“If the end of the quest of artificial intelligence are super intelligent machines, then I think the end of the BCI quest are actually conscious machines.”
Hodak: Internal representations in AI models closely resemble biological brain patterns
“When you train AI models, like image models or, and even language models the representations that you get inside them look a lot like the representations you see in the brain.”
Hodak: Musk founded Neuralink to upgrade humanity against AI risks
“Elon, he, I mean, he saw what was coming in AI, like, very much more clearly than many other people much earlier, and I think the implications of, like, if you gotta, this can't be a separate thing from humanity, and that needs to emerge somehow, I think that …”
Hodak: AI internal representations empirically converge with brain representations
“When you look inside these AI models, you see These mathematical objects that look a lot like what you see in the brain in neuroscience. Like, the representations are converging, and this is an empirical finding.”
Humanity could meaningfully merge consciousness with machines by 2035, Hodak predicts
“Probably not next year, but I think within the next decade. Wow. 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.”
Hodak: Million-dollar blindness gene therapy only marginally slows vision loss for 3%
“There's a gene therapy that's on 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…”
Hodak: Next-gen BCIs could empower stroke patients within five years
“When I think about the next generation 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'll be some patients that maybe had a stroke, maybe had Some other injury, who, you…”
Hodak: The brain and the universe are literally physical computers
“I mean, to me, I don't mean that metaphorically, like the brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer in, in my understanding of the world. I also view the universe generally as a computer. Like we can solve pro like you can solve computational p…”
Hodak: Most people will not accept digital brain replicas as survival
“If I could make a copy of you, and you can talk to that copy, and you're like, okay, I will go away now. I just don't think that many people are going to be like, this is it.”
Hodak: The most fertile path for neuroscience is working on AI
“Well, I mean, ironically, it's probably working on AI. Yeah, I have some, I have a couple of neuroscience friends at OpenAI and Anthropic, who, it's like, we would joke, like, oh, you left neuroscience. Like, no, no, no. It is just way easier to do neuroscienc…”
Hodak: Next-generation Prima implant will expand addressable market to millions
“The TAM will grow over time for this first version. It's on the scale of like hundreds of thousands of patients in the U S and Europe. So for the current version of Freeman is probably hundreds of thousands of patients. And then the next version, which is Goin…”
Hodak: Long-term space exploration requires adapting human bodies rather than exporting Earth
“If we are serious about exploring the universe and going to the stars, we are going to have to adapt ourselves to that environment. We're not going to export earth with us everywhere we go. And these bodies are great, but they're designed for this planet.”
Hodak: Brain-computer interfaces will probably not make thinking faster
“I think that talking or writing is thinking. I think this idea that there's the stuff that's just this kind of preformed in your brain, that if you could access it through BCI, it would be faster is probably not. Not the case.”
Humans can learn to control individual cortical neurons within minutes via feedback
“If I put an electrode almost anywhere in your brain and then wake you up in during surgery, And I show you a flashing light that is, that flashes proportionally to how much that neuron is firing, at least almost anywhere in cortex. Within a couple of minutes, …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Max's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Science Corporation | 1 | 41 | 79% 11/14 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Science Corporation | 1 | 25 | 83% 5/6 | full record on No Priors → |
 BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Science Corporation | 1 | 9 | 50% 2/4 | full record on Big Technology → |