'Promising': Musk says first human gets Neuralink brain implant

(The Hill) -- The first person to be implanted with Neuralink hardware is recovering well and showing “promising” signs in initial results, company founder Elon Musk said Monday.

The tech billionaire said the first Neuralink surgery occurred Sunday, a landmark for the prototype brain medical device.

Animal testing began with the hardware in September, with the product described as a “fully implantable, wireless brain-computer interface.” Musk hopes the Neuralink can help “people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.”

“This ultimately has the potential to restore full body movement,” Musk said in September. “In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI risk civilizational risk reduction by improving human to AI (and human to human) bandwidth by several orders of magnitude. Imagine if Stephen Hawking had had this.”

The company announced in September that testing implants the device in the section of the brain responsible for motor function. The implant is supposed to transmit brain signals to a smartphone app that will decode the intention of the movement. 

Eventually, the goal of the brain implant startup is to allow those with paralysis to use a keyboard or control a computer with just their thoughts. 

Lauren Sforza contributed to this report.