Billionaire Elon Musk announced that his brain chip company, Neuralink, will have its first implant of Blindsight by the end of 2025. The artificial visual prosthesis aims to restore eyesight for blind people.

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“We’re hoping, later this year, to have a first device implant for humans, enabling someone who is completely blind to see,” Musk said in response to a question by an audience member at his Town Hall held in Wisconsin, US, on Sunday (Mar 30) night.

Also read | Musk’s Neuralink announces Blindsight to provide vision to blind, gets FDA's approval

Musk added that in the beginning, the resolution of the vision would be low.

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“It’ll start off with very low-resolution but then over time, the implant would eventually enable vision that is superhuman…” the Tesla CEO said.

Musk said that the chip has shown promising results in monkeys for a few years now.

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According to a post shared by Musk on his social media platform X, Blindsight is designed to “enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see.”

“[I]t will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time,” he had said.

Blindsight: A ‘breakthrough’

The device consists of a microelectrode array, which is embedded in the visual cortex in the brain, which is responsible for processing visual information. Reportedly, it is capable of stimulating neurons or nerve cells located in the visual cortex after relaying patterns from a camera.

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Blindsight a ‘breakthrough’ status last year in September. This tag is given to medical devices that offer diagnosis or treatment of life-threatening conditions.

However, experts have highlighted that this status does not mean that Neuralink has developed a cure for blindness, but is aimed at boosting the speed of development and review of devices that are under development.

In the past, Musk has been criticised for his claims about the device being misleading.

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“At best, we’re talking about something that’s augmentative to a cane and a guide dog; not something that replaces a cane and a guide dog,” Philip Troyk, a biomedical engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said as quoted by IEEE Spectrum.

(With inputs from agencies)