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The chip Neuralink is developing is about the size of a coin, and would be embedded in a person's skull. From the chip, an array of tiny wires, each roughly 20 times thinner than a human hair, fan out into the patient's brain.

The wires are equipped with 1,024 electrodes which are able to monitor brain activity  and, theoretically, electrically stimulate the brain. This data is transmitted wirelessly via the chip to computers, where it can be studied by researchers.

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The robot would work by using a stiff needle to punch the flexible wires emanating from a Neuralink chip into a person's brain, a bit like a sewing machine.

Neuralink released a video showcasing the robot in January 2021.

Musk has claimed the machine could make implanting Neuralink's electrodes as easy as LASIK eye surgery. While this is a bold claim, neuroscientists previously told Insider in 2019 that the machine has some very promising features.

Professor Andrew Hires highlighted a feature, which would automatically adjust the needle to compensate for the movement of a patient's brain, as the brain moves during surgery along with a person's breathing and heartbeat.

The robot as it currently stands is eight feet tall, and while Neuralink is developing its underlying technology its design was crafted by Woke Studios.

The demonstration was proof of concept, and showed how the chip was able to accurately predict the positioning of Gertrude's limbs when she was walking on a treadmill, as well as recording neural activity when the pig snuffled about for food. Musk said the pig had been living with the chip embedded in her skull for two months.

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"In terms of their technology, 1,024 channels is not that impressive these days, but the electronics to relay them wirelessly is state-of-the-art, and the robotic implantation is nice," said Professor Andrew Jackson, an expert in neural interfaces at Newcastle University.

"This is solid engineering but mediocre neuroscience," he said.

Jackson told Insider following the 2020 presentation that the wireless relay from the Neuralink chip could potentially have a big impact on the welfare of animal test subjects in science, as most neural interfaces currently in use on test animals involve wires poking out through the skin.

"Even if the technology doesn't do anything more than we're able to do at the moment — in terms of number of channels or whatever — just from a welfare aspect for the animals, I think if you can do experiments with something that doesn't involve wires coming through the skin, that's going to improve the welfare of animals," he said.

In February 2022, animal-rights group the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said it had submitted a complaint to the US Department of Agriculture after obtaining more than 700 pages of documents relating to monkeys used in Neuralink research at the University of California at Davis between 2017 and 2020.

The group obtained the documents, which included veterinary records and necropsy reports, via a public records request. It said they indicated 23 monkeys had experienced "extreme suffering as a result of inadequate animal care and the highly invasive experimental head implants during the experiments."

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A UC Davis spokesperson told Insider that during its research collaboration with Neuralink, "research protocols were thoroughly reviewed and approved by the campus's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee."

The spokesperson said the collaboration between Neuralink and UC Davis ended in 2020.

"We strive to provide the best possible care to animals in our charge. Animal research is strictly regulated and UC Davis follows all applicable laws and regulations including those of the US Department of Agriculture," they said.

"All the technology that he showed has been already developed in some way or form, [...] Essentially what they've done is just package it into a nice little form that then sends data wirelessly," Dr. Jason Shepherd, an associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, told Insider following the company's 2020 demonstration.

"If you just watched this presentation, you would think that it's coming out of nowhere, that Musk is doing this magic, but in reality, he's really copied and pasted a lot of work from many, many labs that have been working on this," he added.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit on December 6, 2021, Musk said Neuralink hoped to start human testing the following year pending Food and Drug Administration approval.

He repeated the claim on Twitter.

"Progress will accelerate when we have devices in humans (hard to have nuanced conversations with monkeys) next year," Musk tweeted.

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This isn't the first time Musk has set a timeline for getting Neuralink's chips into humans.

Musk said during an appearance on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast in May 2020 that Neuralink could begin testing on human subjects within a year. He made the same claim during an interview on Clubhouse in February 2021.

In 2019, Musk said the company hoped to get a chip into a human patient by the end of 2020.

Experts voiced doubt about this timeline at the time, as part of safety testing a neural interface device involves implanting it in an animal test subject (normally a primate) and leaving it there for an extended amount of time to test its longevity — as any chip would have to stay in a human patient's brain for a lifetime.

"You can't accelerate that process. You just have to wait — and see how long the electrodes last. And if the goal is for these to last decades, it's hard to imagine how you're going to be able to test this without waiting long periods of time to see how well the devices perform," Jacob Robinson, a neuroengineer at Rice University, told STAT News in 2019.

Improved neural interface technology like Neuralink's could help better study and treat severe neurological conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Professor Andrew Hires said another application could be allowing people to control robotic prostheses with their minds.

"The first application you can imagine is better mental control for a robotic arm for someone who's paralyzed," Hires said in a 2019 interview with Insider, adding that the electrodes in a patient's brain could potentially reproduce the sensation of touch, allowing the patient to exert finer motor control over a prosthetic limb.

Although Musk has touted the near-term applications of Neuralink, he often links the company up with his fears about artificial intelligence. Musk has said that he thinks humanity will be able to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence" using technology developed by Neuralink.

Musk told "Artificial Intelligence" podcast host Lex Fridman in 2019 that Neuralink was "intended to address the existential risk associated with digital superintelligence."

"We will not be able to be smarter than a digital supercomputer, so, therefore, if you cannot beat 'em, join 'em," Musk added.

Musk has made lots of fanciful claims about the enhanced abilities Neuralink could confer. In 2020 Musk said people would "save and replay memories" like in "Black Mirror," or telepathically summon their car.

Experts have expressed doubts about these claims.

"Not to say that that won't happen, but I think that the underlying neuroscience is much more shaky. We understand much less about how those processes work in the brain, and just because you can predict the position of the pig's leg when it's walking on a treadmill, that doesn't then automatically mean you'll be able to read thoughts," Prof. Andrew Jackson told Insider in 2020.

In 2019 Prof. Andrew Hires said Musk's claims about merging with AI is where he goes off into "aspirational fantasy land."