als

Brain-computer interface trials are expanding rapidly, with a growing number of volunteers like Casey Harrell using implants to communicate and regain independence, marking a new phase in neurotechnology.

This newsletter covers two stories: Casey Harrell, a man with ALS, becomes the first 'power user' of a brain implant that lets him speak and use the web independently, and explores why South Koreans are far more optimistic about AI than Americans.

Casey Harrell, a man with ALS, has become the first 'power user' of a speech brain-computer interface, using it independently for thousands of hours to speak, browse the web, and work. A study in Nature Medicine reports the device's long-term reliability and expanded capabilities.

GoogleDeepMind collaborated with global scientific experts to evaluate an AI system that identified new targets for liver fibrosis and fresh approaches to ALS, digesting decades of research.

This paper proposes an end-to-end Conformer-based neural decoder for intracortical speech decoding from a participant with ALS, achieving a 23.80% character error rate without any external language model. It demonstrates that meaningful character-level decoding is possible in a fully end-to-end framework.

DeepMind's Co-Scientist AI tool bridges the expertise of two researchers from different biological fields to accelerate ALS research by generating testable hypotheses and identifying RNA-based mechanisms for potential therapies.