Max Hodak
Co-founder & CEO, Science Corporation · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
25statements → 14claims → 6claims resolved → 83%fully supported → 3.76/5average certainty → 2.08/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →
5 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not yet assessed 6 not checkable as stated how the 14 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
7 predictions · 7 assertions · 3 opinions · 4 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 14 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, 2 are not yet assessed, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Max argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Max Hodak on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Max Hodak said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: 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.”
Hodak: Science's in-house retinal gene therapy probably enters human trials next year
“What we ended up doing is we developed indigenously a state of the art gene therapy, which is probably going to humans next year.”
Hodak: Science secured European marketing approval for Prima retinal implant in July
“So it took us about two years for post acquisition to get it to the place where this was possible, but we just in July got marketing approval in Europe for Prima to start commercially selling it there.”
Hodak: Science Sees Path to Red and Green Color Vision
“We think we see a path to get at least red and green.
Blue is a little bit trickier.”
Hodak: Prima implant clinical trial patients read books and solved puzzles
“I mean, in the clinical trial, I mean, the main thing was just the existence proof of like that success was a possible outcome, right? Like that we had patients filling in Sudoku puzzles or crossword puzzles. There were patients that were reading books.”
Hodak: Treating BCI as one bet is like having one drug bet
“I think BCI is a category, kind of like how pharma is a category. I think sometimes you, I'll talk to VCs and like, oh, we have a BCI bet. Like, do you have a drug bet? You made one bet on a drugs? Like, that's that, that's how you think about the category.”
Hodak: Science Is Not Far From Completing a Mouse Connectome
“We're still relatively far from a human connectome, but I think we're not that far from a mouse connectome.”
Hodak: Second Sight's retinal implant received $150,000 per patient in reimbursement
“Second site, 10 years ago, they, so there's a company about a decade ago that had a retinal prosthesis that works differently than ours does. It did not get the type of performance that Prima does, but was Briefly approved. Cause then there's really nothing fo…”
Hodak: Vision gene therapy reimburses at nearly $500,000 per eye
“In the mid-twenty-tens, there's a gene therapy that works, that is only relevant in the first place for about five percent of patients in one narrow indication. And it really doesn't work that well. It gets .one lines of improvement. It kind of slows the rate …”
Hodak: BCIs and perfusion medicine can significantly improve healthspan
“Through a mix of the BCIs that allow you to kind of change the system, the thing that it's interacting with and our perfusion medicine program we think that there's ways to significantly improve not just lifespan, but healthspan and kind of create a better qua…”
Hodak: The human brain has an evolved 10-bit-per-second cognitive bottleneck
“There's this, like, 10 bit per second kind of famous, like, cognitive bottleneck. There's this observation that the brain seems to process information, like, if there's a bunch of ways you can triangulate this, you can put somebody with, A perfect memory on a …”
Hodak: Science focuses on sensory restoration and substrate independence, not brain keyboards
“The, at the other end of that spectrum are things like generating vision or generating hearing or achieving substrate independence. Those are the things that we are focused on, not brain keyboard.”
Hodak: Science finished macular degeneration trial, planning studies for RP and Stargardt's
“Specifically this is diseases like macular degeneration, which our clinical trial was done and we're about to do studies in retinitis pigmentosa and Stargardt's and a couple of their diseases.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak | Aug 20, 2026 | 23m |