Assertion Contradicted
Hodak: A major organ perfusion firm makes more from private jet logistics
“Like one of the big companies in the space, it turns out that they're like private jet logistics business is bigger than their medical device business.”
Insight
Hodak: Earth's history shows that greater intelligence is inherently dangerous
“Humanity has totally dominated the planet, And we keep our closest living relatives in glass boxes so they don't go extinct. And so there's a real history here of greater intelligence being very dangerous.”
Disclosure
Hodak: Personal probability of AI doom is well below 50 percent
“Like I don't, my PDOOM is pretty, it's not zero, but it's not 50%. It's well below that.”
Assertion Supported
Hodak: Science completed clinical trial published in NEJM in 2025
“We finished a big clinical trial last year, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the fall.”
Disclosure
Hodak: Science is submitting its retinal implant for market approval this year
“So we are submitting for approval now. It's not approved on, on the market yet. Hope to have that later this year.”
Insight
Hodak: BCIs will be a broad medical category, not a single device
“There are many types of BCIs. So it's, there, it really is going to be a category like pharma. It's not one product. I don't think there's going to be like the VCI that people get. And there are different modalities that will work for different things.”
Assertion Supported
Hodak: Current cortical motor decoders achieve only around 10 bits per second
“Spoken word is like 40 bits per second. You can, many people can type in the like 20, twenty-ish bits. And so the 10 bit per second cortical motor decode is like not going to make your life better. I wouldn't get serious brain surgery for that.”
Assertion Supported
Adults cured of congenital cataracts struggle to process visual information
“There actually are some cases of patients that were born blind who but it wasn't it wasn't a loss of the optic nerve, it wasn't something in the brain, but they had congenital cataracts, so their vision was blurry from birth, and they were never able to really…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hodak: Ultra-high-bandwidth bio-hybrid neural interfaces will eventually be built
“The deeper question is like, what is the qualia of like a brain to brain of like an ultra high bandwidth, like a bio hybrid neural interface. And that is just like, I don't like impossible to imagine. I, those devices will get built and we're going to find out…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2029
Hodak: Science implant will treat retinitis pigmentosa and Stargardt disease
“One of the nice things about our device is that it doesn't We're somewhat agnostic to the reason that you lost the photoreceptors, and so we think it'll also work for retinitis pigmentosa, for Stargardt's, for these other indications.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hodak: Science's optogenetic retinal therapy is five to seven years from translation
“And then we could target them to the bipolar cells, but that still has like five to seven years of clinical translation away if it ends up working, and there's a bunch of Pitfalls it could run into along the way”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hodak: Neuroscientists transition to AI because artificial models are easier to study
“Many people in neuroscience have gone over to AI because they're basically still doing neuroscience, but it's just way easier to do it on the models.”
Insight
Hodak: Running startups is an oral tradition learned from key cultures
“Running a startup is an oral tradition. There have been a couple of nucleating times in history where, like, a really remarkable group of people have kind of figured it out from scratch. Like, I think PayPal was like this, but almost always beyond that, it's l…”
Assertion Supported
Hodak: Science conducted a clinical trial across 17 sites in Europe
“There's a big clinical trial in Europe across 17 sites, and there's a huge effect.”
Assertion Supported
Early BCIs used fixed weights and let the brain learn cursor control
“In the first experiments for this, they actually didn't fit anything at all. They just took a couple, they took two neurons or a handful of neurons and fixed the weights. So it said, when this neuron fires more, we're going to go up the screen. When this neuro…”
Disclosure
Hodak: Science is starting a clinical trial for inherited retinal diseases
“We're actually just about to start a new clinical trial on, on inherited retinal disease which affects much younger people.”
Assertion Supported
Hodak: The Prima electrical stimulation retinal implant cannot treat glaucoma
“One of the diseases that Prima or electrical similar doesn't treat is glaucoma, which is loss of the optic nerve itself.”
Max Hodak