Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Sonal Choxi, our editor-in-chief, and I'm excited to share a new show from us today, 16 minutes, a short news podcast, where we cover recent headlines of the week, The A6 and Z way. Why are they in the news? What's hype, what's real from our vantage point? And what are our experts quick takes on the trends? Today's episode is a little over 16 minutes covering TikTok with general partner for consumer

Connie Chan, Face App with Operating Partner for Security and former CISO at Box, Joel De LaGarza,

IHeartRadio's direct listing with operating partner Jamie McGurk.

But we began with A6 and Z biogeneral partner Vijay on the recent headlines around one of

the companies co-founded

by Elon Musk, NeurLink, and go over that news for the first half of this episode.

Elon Musk this week announced advances in BCIs or brain computer interfaces or neural interfaces.

And it's something that people have been talking about forever.

And while they did acknowledge it's a long road, he even hinted, and this is where it gets a little

crazy, but sci-fi cool, he even hinted at the option of merging with AI in the future.

What's interesting is they announced a sewing machine, which is basically a robot that sows in delicate, flexible electrodes called a neural lace, which by the way is not a marketing term that Elon Musk invented.

It's actually a term from the culture of sci-fi series from Ian Banks, which was written the way, is not a marketing term that Elon Musk invented. It's actually a term from

the culture of sci-fi series from Ian Banks, which was written from the late 80s to 2000s.

The processor is an application-specific integrated circuit, and basically it monitors brain activity,

decodes it, and ideally in the future, way future claim is that you could even potentially

translate machines to not just read,

but actually even write to the brain. But the paper they release, which you can download,

it's called an integrated brain machine interface platform with thousands of channels, was not

peer reviewed. It's a white paper. So I think we want to figure out, VJ, like what's hype,

what's real here, especially given the trend of brain computer interfaces, like where are we really in this journey?

Well, you know, if you think about like what this technology can do, there's different

styles.

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