Neuralink Update on Blindsight, Telepathy and the R1 Robot
Elon Musk wrote on X on October 29 and 30 that Blindsight is "ready from an engineering standpoint. Just waiting on regulatory approval." He described it as Neuralink's second product, intended to let people who are completely blind, or who have never seen, see. In January he said Neuralink was ready for a first implant "pending regulatory approval," according to TokenPost, so the October posts repeat that position.
Regulatory status and timeline
The one regulatory step Neuralink has announced is Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA, disclosed on September 17, 2024. The designation gives developers access to FDA experts and prioritized review of future submissions. It does not authorize marketing. Musk said in spring 2025 that Neuralink hoped to implant a first human participant that year, and in June 2025 he said first vision implants would come within six to 12 months, a window that closed around June 2026. Wikipedia's entry records no published human implantation results as of October 2026, and TokenPost reports that Neuralink's trial page lists Blindsight as an upcoming study with no active human trial. Musk's posts name no regulator and give no date for a first implant.
What Blindsight is meant to do
Blindsight sends camera-generated visual information to the visual cortex, bypassing damaged eyes and optic nerves, according to Benzinga. Musk has said it requires an intact visual cortex and that people blind from birth could see for the first time. Early images will have low resolution. At a Wisconsin town hall in 2025, Musk compared the first version to "Atari graphics," per CXO Digital Pulse, and no resolution figures have been published. Musk has said one monkey carried an implant for three years. Neuralink's 2025 summer update, as summarized by the Biowire Bytes newsletter, tied the first human participant to growth from today's 1,024 electrodes to about 3,000 and to new stimulator hardware.
The rest of the October update
Most of the new material concerned speech. During a 72-hour hackathon with a speech restoration participant, Neuralink engineers added automatic detection of when the user intends to speak, iPhone call integration in the Bloom speech app so the person on the call hears the generated speech, and a prototype in which thinking "Hey Neuralink" starts a task in Grok, the xAI assistant. TeslaNorth reports that one ALS participant reached 75 words per minute in the first week of speech work. Neuralink's January update reported typing speeds up to 40 words per minute for some participants, according to Lapaas Voice, which adds that Neuralink has not shown a system that routinely beats human speech. Musk's claim that Telepathy output will exceed the fastest speech or typing within a few years is a projection. The VOICE speech study is registered as NCT07224256, and Neuralink posts updates at neuralink.com/updates.
The R1 robot that places the electrode threads uses eight cameras and optical coherence tomography scanners to map brain tissue in real time and passes through the dura mater instead of removing it, according to Interesting Engineering and Ubergizmo coverage of an April 2026 Neuralink video. Neuralink figures relayed by secondary outlets put insertion time at 1.5 seconds per thread, down from 17 seconds for the original robot. A Neuralink engineer told MobiHealthNews that the surgeon opens the skull and lines up the brain to the robot before it inserts threads. Interesting Engineering counts about 20 recipients of the implant by late 2025 or early 2026.
What earlier cortical implants showed
Other groups have human data. Cortigent's Orion, a 60-electrode array placed on the surface of the visual cortex, was implanted in six patients between January 2018 and January 2019. The company reported in January 2026 that all six did better on visual function tests with the system on than off over a study that ended in March 2025. At 12 months, one patient had a seizure during controlled testing, and two of the six had adverse events related to the device or procedure, including hand twitching and headache, according to Ophthalmology Times. A group in Spain implanted 96-channel intracortical arrays in four blind volunteers for six months. Participants identified some letters, recognized object boundaries, and used the evoked spots of light for orientation and mobility tasks, according to a December 2024 symposium abstract. A 2021 study in Brain Stimulation found that eye movements shift where evoked phosphenes appear, even after years of blindness.
About the author
David Borish writes The AI Spectator and is the author of The Tony Hawk Paradox: When Video Games Predict Reality. More at davidborish.com
