Co-founder Max Hodak Leaves Elon Musk’s Neuralink

After demonstrating telepathic powers in a primate, Neuralink has another surprise. The company’s co-founder Max Hodak parted ways with the company. Hodak founded the brain-chip company along with Elon Musk back in 2016. From solving brain diseases to transhumanism, the purview of the brain-implant company had captured the public imagination in no time. The abrupt departure of Max Hodak, and Musk’s silence, hints at trouble at the management level. 

Hodak has a background in biomedical engineering. “I believe that one of the essential goals of our generation is to understand the physics of consciousness and learn to engineer experience directly,” wrote Hodak in his blog. Before Neuralink, he also founded Transcriptic, a robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences. Neuralink has been on the hunt for engineers for building brain machine interfaces. In the past, Musk used Neuralink events as a platform to reel in exceptional candidates. 

“First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs,” tweeted Musk on the eve of the Mind Pong demo. The stated objective of Neuralink is to understand the human brain. But, there are hardly any references. Moreover,finding talent with interdisciplinary expertise is a challenge on its own. Hodak, who had left Neuralink a few weeks ago, said he will remain a “huge cheerleader” for the company who has taught him a ton. As for the future of Hodak and what went wrong at Neuralink, we still have to wait. But, when one of Hodak’s Twitter followers asked him what’s next, he said, “Not Jurassic Park.”