Opinion
Thomas Reardon calls the iPhone a Trump-level disaster for humanity
“I think the iPhone is a Trump level disaster for humanity.”
Opinion
Neuralink's clinical-first strategy leads to grindingly slow progress, says Thomas Reardon
“Whereas if you go just to the clinical population first, which is sort of where Neuralink is going with their work, it's just grindingly slow progress.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
No living neuroscientist can explain what a thought is, says Thomas Reardon
“I'll tell you there's not a neuroscientist alive who can tell you what a thought is.”
Disclosure
Thomas Reardon wants to replace keyboards with thought-speed neural text input
“What I want to do is get rid of the 19th century keyboard entirely and allow you to effectively sort of text, if you will, at the level of your cognitive capacity.”
Assertion Partly supported
CTRL-Labs reconstructs motor neuron activity before physical muscle movement occurs
“We figured out how to actually reconstruct the activity of the motor neurons that drove that electrical activity in the muscles themselves. This is activity that actually happens long before The muscles actually move, you know, long in the computational sense …”
Assertion Supported
Reardon: CTRL-Labs captures single neuron signals without penetrating the skull
“This is a, Pretty significant breakthrough that we're able to get to single neurons without basically penetrating into your skull.”
Assertion Contradicted
A trained CTRL-Labs band will not work at all on another person
“This is a very personal model that is custom to just you. When you put on the band after you've trained it, if you put it on somebody else, it doesn't work at all. It is, and it's not like design. That's just the way neural interfaces are required to work. The…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CTRL-Labs uniquely identifies users among 7.4 billion in 800 milliseconds
“I can put a band on you and after 10 minutes I will know enough from those signals that I can pull you out of a population of 7.4 billion people after 10 minutes of training data and do that in about 800 milliseconds.”
Opinion
Decoding the human nervous system is harder than predicting the weather
“I mean, decoding the human nervous system is the mother of all machine learning problems. I think it's significantly more complicated than predicting the weather, say.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CTRL-Labs needs only a dozen neurons to decode hand movement intent
“You need, like I said, 30,000 neurons to drive these hand movements, but it's mostly because you need those neurons to sort of gain up the signal. But we only need, like, a dozen to be able to actually understand what the actual movement intent was, rather tha…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reardon: The human brain's only physical output is controlling muscles
“Ah, the only thing your brain does is turn muscles on and off. There's nothing else that it does.”
Disclosure
CTRL-Labs began shipping its neural developer kits in September 2019
“We started shipping our developer kits last Friday after, boy, over three years of work.”
Assertion Supported
Thomas Reardon created Internet Explorer in 1994 and led it through IE4
“I started up Internet Explorer in 94 and then worked on IE all the way through IE four, when we finally sort of won the browser war.”
Disclosure
CTRL-Labs plans subscriptions for continuous neural modeling with free developer hardware
“Yeah, so our revenue model is based on us charging effectively a subscription for modeling work, but in fact, what we are pushing right now is one in which it's a free license to the hardware and a free license to the initial models, and we want to get paid Fo…”
Assertion Partly supported
Reardon: Genetic clones have entirely different motor neuron maps
“Your clone has an entirely different motor neuron map than you have.”
Disclosure
Reardon: CTRL-Labs is primarily a neuroscience and machine learning company
“We are only very thinly a hardware company. We are overwhelmingly a neurosciences and machine learning company.”
Assertion Supported
CTRL-Labs band decodes motor neuron activity through the forearm
“Okay, so this is somebody wearing our band that's decoding the activity of the neurons that drive the hand, so that happens through the forearm.”
Disclosure
Inbound robotics demand drove unexpected investments at CTRL-Labs
“We didn't start the company thinking about robotics at all, and those opportunities have all kind of inbound to us and actually led to some of our investments.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CTRL-Labs received up to 100,000 developer applications for its platform
“More than 10,000, less than a 100,000.”
Assertion Partly supported
Thomas Reardon co-founded W3C with Tim Berners-Lee and helped develop CSS
“I helped found the W-three-C with Tim Berners-Lee and kind of set up those initial web standards I, you know, I'm very proud of my work on CSS, if people know what that is.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Training the CTRL-Labs neural device for full text input takes one hour
“Today it takes you know, an order an hour or so to do text training.”
Disclosure
Reardon: CTRL-Labs conducts video interviews with every developer applicant
“We interview, we do video conferences and interview every single applicant.”
