Connecting my brain to the cloud—via BCI, or brain computer-interface—is something I’m looking forward to.
Just imagine your ability to “think and Google”… see through the eyes of a robot… massively increase your intelligence via 24×7 access to Gemini 3.0 and GPT-5.
One of Ray Kurzweil’s famous predictions is that “by the early 2030s, we’ll achieve high-bandwidth connection between the human neocortex and the cloud” – allowing people to vastly increase their intelligence.
I used to think that Ray got this prediction wrong (he has famously achieved a predictive accuracy of ~86%) – that is, until I met Max Hodak and learned about his pioneering breakthroughs at Science Corporation.
Our brains will never grow bigger. They are landlocked by our skull, which in turn is limited by your mom’s birth canal. The only way to 10x our intelligence is to connect our brains—in a high-bandwidth fashion—with external resources. Enter the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
The field of BCIs is advancing rapidly, with over 250 BCI companies (as of 2024) having attracted approximately $2.3 billion in cumulative funding. The leading companies like Neuralink, Paradromics, OpenWater, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, and Blackrock Neurotech have made significant strides in human trials and FDA approvals.
But despite this progress and some flashy demos, current BCI technology is still somewhat barbaric and faces serious limitations. Traditional electro-mechanical implants are invasive, often damaging brain tissue during insertion, while non-invasive approaches like EEGs provide only very coarse neural readings. This makes such procedures hard to justify for all but the most serious conditions.
Enter Science Corporation, led by CEO Max Hodak, former President of Neuralink, with a revolutionary approach that could change everything: a biohybrid neural interface that uses living neurons to grow non-destructively into your brain-tissue, connecting external circuitry with the internal wiring of your brain. BTW, I’m super excited to have Max Hodak on the Faculty at the 2025 Abundance Summit this year.
“Placing anything into the brain inevitably destroys some amount of brain tissue,” explains Hodak. “Destroying 10,000 cells to record from 1,000 might be perfectly justified if you have a serious injury and those thousand neurons create a lot of value—but it really hurts as a scaling characteristic.”
What’s Science Corporation’s solution?
A remarkable silicon honeycomb-like structure with 100,000 “microwells”—tiny cylindrical holes roughly 15 micrometers deep—where individual living neurons (grown from neural stem cells) can grow out of the microwell circuitry directly into the subject’s brain tissue.
When placed onto the brain’s surface, the neural stem cells grow axons—think of the roots of a plant—and dendrites (which form synapses with other cells) downward into the host’s brain tissue. As these biological “roots” grow into your brain tissue they naturally integrate, forming synaptic connections, creating a biological bridge between mind and machine, and they do this without physically destroying the brain tissue around them.
Max Hodak’s technology promises the potential to increase the bandwidth of BCI tech on the order of 100 to 10,000 greater than what we’ve seen with Elon’s Neuralink.
The implications are staggering…
In recent experiments published on bioRxiv, the team demonstrated that mice with these implants could detect and respond to light signals through the device, suggesting successful integration between the implanted neurons and the animals’ native brain cells.
As Alan Mardinly, Director of Biology at Science Corporation, explains: “The principal advantages of a biohybrid implant are that it can dramatically change the scaling laws of how many neurons you can interface with versus how much damage you do to the brain.”
The near-term implications are profound (helping patients with ALS communicate, enabling paralyzed individuals to control computer cursors, and facilitating rehabilitation for stroke victims) – but the long-term potential is mind-boggling:
- Could we eventually “think and Google,” accessing the internet directly with our thoughts?
- Might we enhance human memory and information processing beyond current limits?
- Could millions of interconnected minds create a new form of collective intelligence?
- How might human-AI symbiosis transform problem-solving and innovation?
- How about human-robot symbiosis where you can see and act through an Optimus robot?
- Can we increase your IQ from 120 to 1,000 using this tech? What breakthroughs might emerge when we can augment human cognition?
As we progress toward Kurzweil’s vision of seamless brain-cloud connectivity, Science Corporation’s biohybrid approach could be the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for, which is why I’m so excited to interview Max Hodak during the Abundance Summit this March.
Live Abundantly, Peter H. Diamandis, MD
