In the ever-accelerating world of technological innovation, it’s easy to get swept up in the immediate whirlwind of AI data centers and the fierce competition for top talent. Yet, beneath the surface of this frantic activity, monumental advancements are steadily brewing. Six years ago, at a San Francisco event, I recall asking Sam Altman, the visionary behind OpenAI, about the financial viability of his organization’s complex corporate structure. His response, delivered with an almost unsettling conviction, was that someday, he’d simply ask the AI. While the audience chuckled, mistaking his earnest belief for a quip, Altman’s conviction was unwavering.
Fast forward to a recent conversation with Max Hodak, the co-founder and CEO of Science Corp. Sitting across from me, Hodak, with his understated demeanor—clad in jeans and a black zip-up sweatshirt, looking more like a concert-goer than a titan of industry—emanates a similar, yet distinct, brand of audacious foresight. His dry wit and engaging presence quickly disarmed any preconceptions, drawing the audience into his compelling narrative.
Hodak’s journey into the realm of advanced technology began remarkably early. He started programming at the tender age of six. During his undergraduate years at Duke, he found himself immersed in the pioneering research of Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist whose work in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) has since become a subject of both acclaim and public scrutiny for commercial ventures.
His formative experience in the BCI space solidified in 2016 when he co-founded Neuralink alongside Elon Musk. Hodak served as its president, effectively steering the company’s day-to-day operations until 2021. Reflecting on his time working closely with Musk, Hodak described a recurring pattern: “We’d encounter situations where I’d see two completely opposing solutions, and I’d present them, asking, ‘Is it A or B?’ And he’d definitively say, ‘It’s definitely B,’ and the problem would vanish.” This iterative process, marked by decisive leadership, evidently left a profound impression.
Armed with these insights, Hodak, along with three former Neuralink colleagues, embarked on a new venture, Science Corp., approximately four years ago. Much like Altman’s seemingly outlandish pronouncements, Hodak articulates his team’s ambitious goals with a disarming placidity that compels belief. It’s as if the very boundaries of human cognition are poised to expand sooner than most of us dare to imagine, and he intends to be at the forefront of that transformation.
The BCI Revolution: A Quiet Surge
While the tech world has been preoccupied with the frenetic pace of AI infrastructure development and the constant battle for specialized talent, a significant movement has been gaining momentum in the background: brain-computer interfaces. The World Economic Forum reports that nearly 700 companies globally have some affiliation with BCI technology, including major tech players.
Beyond Neuralink, Microsoft Research has dedicated the last seven years to its own BCI project. Apple, in a strategic move earlier this year, partnered with Synchron, a company backed by industry heavyweights like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, to develop a protocol enabling BCIs to control iPhones and iPads. Rumors even suggest that Sam Altman himself is supporting a rival to Neuralink.
Furthermore, China has made a strong commitment to this field, releasing its “Implementation Plan for Promoting Innovation and Development of the BCI Industry” in August. This plan targets core technological breakthroughs by 2027 and aims for global leadership by 2030.
Innovation Beyond Neuroscience: The Engineering Leap
Hodak acknowledges a valid critique of current BCI companies: the neuroscience itself isn’t entirely new. “Decoding cursor control or robotic arm control from a human – people have been doing that for 30 years,” he states. The true innovation, he emphasizes, lies in the engineering.
“The innovation at Neuralink,” Hodak explains, “is in making a device small enough and low-power enough that you can fully implant it and close the skin, and have something that isn’t an infection risk. That genuinely was new.”
While Hodak admits that a comprehensive understanding of the brain’s intricate workings is still elusive, Science Corp. is charting a different course by focusing on revenue generation alongside its long-term technological pursuits. On a smaller scale, the company develops and sells tools to other researchers, effectively transforming costly laboratory equipment into accessible, portable devices. “We’re taking a $300,000 cart-sized recording system and turning it into a $2,000 handheld,” Hodak illustrates.
The more significant opportunity lies in bringing a functional product to market that not only aids people but also generates revenue, allowing Science Corp. to quietly pursue its ambitious goal of reshaping human consciousness.
Prima: Restoring Sight, One Pixel at a Time
Science Corp.’s initial commercial endeavor is a procedure named Prima, a testament to the immediate impact of BCI technology. This innovation garnered significant attention, even gracing the cover of Time magazine. Prima involves implanting a microchip, smaller than a grain of rice, directly into the retina. Coupled with specialized glasses featuring a camera and, for the time being, a portable two-pound battery pack, this technology offers a remarkable restoration of vision for individuals suffering from advanced macular degeneration.
The results are far from mere fuzzy light perception; patients are regaining the ability to perceive forms. In completed clinical trials involving 38 patients, Science Corp. reports that an impressive 80% were able to read again, albeit two letters at a time. “To my knowledge, this is the first time that restoration of the ability to fluently read has ever been definitively shown in blind patients,” Hodak proudly states.
It’s important to note that Science Corp. acquired the core Prima technology from Pixium Vision, a French company, last year. They subsequently refined it, completed the trials initiated by Pixium, and submitted the findings for regulatory approval in Europe. Hodak anticipates launching Prima next summer, though U.S. regulatory approval from the FDA is still pending.
Regarding the FDA’s timeline, Hodak remarks, “We’re working with the FDA, although there are some questions on exactly the timeline for that.” Nevertheless, at an estimated initial cost of $200,000 per procedure, Science Corp. projects profitability with as few as 50 patients per month.
The Brain in a Dish: Gene Therapy and Beyond
The next frontier for Science Corp. lies in gene therapy, specifically optogenetic gene therapy. This cutting-edge approach aims to render neurons light-sensitive, allowing them to be controlled by light rather than invasive electrodes.
The concept isn’t new, but Science Corp. believes it has overcome the challenges that have eluded others. The human retina, Hodak explains, has three crucial layers: photoreceptors (rods and cones) that capture light, bipolar cells that transmit signals, and optic nerves that relay information to the brain. In macular degeneration, the photoreceptors are damaged.
Prima’s electrodes directly stimulate the bipolar cells, bypassing the defunct photoreceptor layer. Gene therapy, however, aims to eliminate the need for electrodes altogether. The strategy involves engineering surviving cells with new proteins that respond to light.
“The eye is a really ideal place to do this type of gene therapy work, because it’s kind of left alone by the immune system,” Hodak elaborates. In other parts of the body, the immune system often attacks engineered cells expressing unfamiliar proteins. The eye, however, has evolved a unique tolerance for change.
While other companies are pursuing similar avenues, Hodak contends that they are either targeting the wrong cell layers or their engineered proteins are less effective. “They’re not as fast, they’re not as sensitive. The proteins that we’re actually using are state of the art,” he asserts.
Even gene therapy, while groundbreaking, is not Science Corp.’s ultimate destination. The long-term vision, a concept Hodak has likely contemplated his entire life, is the cultivation of new brain tissue.
The Limitations of Electrodes and the Promise of Bio-Integration
Hodak identifies electrodes as a crude and potentially damaging method for brain interfacing. “Every time you place something mechanically into the brain, there’s no free space in there,” he notes. While the redundancy of the cerebral cortex can compensate for some tissue damage, particularly in cases of spinal cord injury or blindness, this inherent limitation prevents scalability to billions of channels – a fundamental constraint he sees in approaches like Neuralink’s.
The idea of augmenting the brain with lab-grown neurons might sound far-fetched, but Science Corp. has already demonstrated a proof-of-concept in mice. Their device, a miniature waffle-like grid placed on the brain’s surface, contains engineered neurons cultivated from stem cells. These neurons are meticulously modified for specific functions.
Once implanted, these engineered neurons begin to grow new connections—axons and dendrites—extending into the brain tissue and integrating with existing neural circuits. In their mouse trials, Science Corp. reported that these additional neurons functioned effectively some of the time. Astonishingly, five out of nine mice learned to navigate left or right when the device was activated.
“It does this in a perfectly bio-compatible way, because the brain is really just a bunch of neurons,” Hodak explains. “Just neurons talking to neurons, the way evolution intended, save for the not-inconsiderable fact that some of the neurons come from a lab.”
Built-in Safeguards: The ‘Vitamin’ Solution
What about potential complications? Hodak offers a startlingly simple solution: a vitamin. “An FDA-approved thing that you wouldn’t otherwise take,” he states, explaining that this vitamin would trigger the engineered neurons to self-destruct. This built-in biological kill switch offers a unique layer of safety and control.
BCI as a Longevity Vector and the Quest for Consciousness
Hodak reframes the entire BCI endeavor as intrinsically linked to longevity. “I actually think BCI is a longevity-adjacent story,” he declares.
He posits that the brain’s two primary functions are intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence, he notes, is substrate-independent, manifesting in both biological brains and artificial neural networks (GPUs). However, the ultimate frontier, in his view, is the creation of conscious machines. This involves deciphering the physical laws governing subjective experience and then engineering them into novel substrates.
“In order to prove a theory of consciousness is right, you have to see it for yourself,” Hodak explains. “That will require these big brain-computer interfaces.” He believes that once humanity cracks the “binding problem”—understanding how billions of neurons coalesce to create a unified subjective experience—truly transformative possibilities will emerge.
Hodak speculates about the potential for merging multiple brains into a single consciousness, or even expanding the boundaries of a single brain to encompass external devices or entire groups of people. This concept, while unsettling, draws parallels to speculative fiction, such as the Apple TV+ show “Pluribus,” where humanity transforms into a collective hive mind.
“Will there be some giant super organisms that correspond to world cultures? Will there be dyads, like the next step up in marriage?” he muses, acknowledging the profound uncertainty surrounding the ultimate applications of such technology. “It’s kind of tough to imagine how it will get used, but I’m pretty confident those devices will get built.”
The logical endpoint, as Hodak envisions it, is not simply enhanced human intelligence but a profound merger of humans and machines, and even human-to-human consciousness integration. This could lead to a future where consciousness transcends individual substrates, bodies, and minds.
“You could cure cancer, you could cure cardiovascular disease, you could cure all metabolic disease,” Hodak states. “But there’s this alternative view of substrate independence that just basically says, what if we didn’t need to solve those problems in the first place?” This suggests an alternative to the perpetual maintenance of failing biological systems: the migration of consciousness to more resilient platforms.
The Tipping Point: From Patient Care to Ubiquity
What makes Hodak’s vision so compelling is its grounding in tangible timelines and practical considerations. He is not indulging in abstract futurism; he is outlining concrete steps with specific milestones.
“By 2035, [biohybrid neural interfaces] will be basically available for patients in need,” he predicts, “And that will start to really deform the world in interesting ways.”
To be clear, Hodak is not suggesting widespread elective brain surgeries for healthy individuals in the near future. “These are [for] very serious brain surgeries,” he emphasizes. However, he acknowledges that as people age, "many people eventually become patients.”
He anticipates that as the technology matures, surgeries will become safer, and the benefits will become more pronounced, gradually expanding the patient population. By the late 2040s, a timeframe that feels surprisingly close, Hodak believes this technology will become “really ubiquitous.”
The truly paradigm-shifting year, he posits, is 2035. “That’s when, Hodak predicts, ‘patient number one gets the choice of like, ‘You can die of pancreatic cancer, or you can be inserted into the matrix and then it will accelerate from there.’” He presents a stark scenario: a decade from now, individuals facing terminal illnesses might opt to have their consciousness uploaded and preserved through BCI technology, a prospect that evokes both fascination and concern.
Economic Ripples: The Healthcare Paradox
The proliferation and advancement of BCIs raise profound questions about the future of healthcare economics. While current treatments for conditions like macular degeneration are often covered by insurance, the advent of sophisticated BCIs could fundamentally disrupt existing healthcare models.
Hodak draws an analogy to consumer technology, where advancements typically lead to deflationary trends—devices become better and cheaper, expanding markets. Healthcare, however, operates under a “fixed bucket of money,” as he puts it. As BCI technology extends lifespans and enhances well-being, the demand for healthcare spending is likely to increase.
“The problem is that as new technologies come along that produce better outcomes and longer lives, there’s more stuff to spend money on for better outcomes,” Hodak explains. “You can’t spend like 10 times as much on healthcare. This would be a catastrophe.”
He identifies a fundamental conflict: either healthcare spending escalates to unsustainable levels, or access to advanced BCI treatments becomes a matter of affordability, potentially exacerbating societal inequalities. The prospect of cognitive enhancements creating a stark class division, where individuals with superior recall or instantaneous processing abilities gain an insurmountable advantage, is a deeply unsettling, yet increasingly plausible, near-term reality.
Looking Ahead: Societal Impact and Existential Questions
As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Hodak about his broader concerns for society. With a wry smile, he admits, “I worry a lot more about Twitter than I do about these things,” suggesting that the immediate dangers of information manipulation through current digital platforms loom larger in his mind than the more speculative BCI futures.
Leaving the discussion, my thoughts drift to “Pluribus,” a show Hodak hasn’t yet seen. The series presents a vision of a hive mind offering ultimate knowledge and freedom from loneliness, but at the cost of individual identity. It’s a dystopian mirror to Hodak’s visions, raising the profound question of what we gain and what we lose in the pursuit of ultimate connection and enhancement.
I also reflect on Altman’s earlier remark about asking the AI, a statement that initially elicited amusement precisely because it seemed so alien to many. Years ago, as a nascent reporter in Silicon Valley, I often reacted with similar skepticism to ambitious technological claims. Now, witnessing how many of those once-absurd ideas have reshaped our world, I’ve learned the value of listening, observing, and waiting for the future to unfold. The journey of Science Corp., from restoring sight to potentially redefining consciousness itself, is a compelling narrative that underscores the relentless, and often surprising, trajectory of human innovation.