It turns out that Valve boss Gabe Newell is also the cofounder of a neuroscience company called Starfish that's "developing a broad range of foundational technologies to enable new ways to interact with the brain," and if all goes well its first neural interface chip may launch in late 2025.
The 'brain interface' thing isn't a new interest for Newell: In 2021, for instance, he went deep (and, honestly, got a little weird) about the potential of brain-computer interface technology in gaming, but he was talking about biometric interfaces at least as far back as 2010. According to The Verge, Starfish Neuroscience was launched in 2019, although it remained quiet until last week, when its first (and thus far only) blog post (via Brad Lynch) offered a little insight into what the company is aiming for.
Starfish is taking a different approach to brain interface technology than other companies working in the field, neuroengineer Nate Cermak explained in the update—foremost among them presumably being Neuralink, although it's not mentioned by name in the update.
"Existing approaches to interfacing with the brain predominantly focus on interacting with a single brain region (for example, deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease)," Cermak wrote. "However, there is increasing evidence that a number of neurological disorders involve circuit-level dysfunction, in which the interactions between brain regions may be misregulated."
Cermak said developing therapies for those disorders "will require distributed neural interfaces capable of interacting with the brain at the circuit level; that is, reading and writing to multiple connected parts of the brain at once."
Current tech really isn't up to the task for a variety of reasons—size, power requirements, "surgical burden"—which is where Starfish hopes to come in: The company is working to develop "a new class of minimally-invasive, distributed neural interfaces that enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions." The work is still very preliminary at this point, but it seems to be coming along reasonably well.
"We anticipate our first chips arriving in late 2025 and we are interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip would open new and exciting avenues," Cermak wrote. "At this early stage, we’re especially interested in collaborators for whom this technology would pair well with their existing work in fields such as wireless power delivery and communication, or those designing custom implanted neural interfaces."
This new brain chip technology isn't the only thing Starfish has on the go: It's also developing a "targeted hyperthermia device" with potential uses in cancer treatment, and is researching "transcranial magnetic stimulation" therapies for possible use across a range of neurological disorders. Big stuff indeed—something to keep in mind the next time you find yourself wondering where Half-Life 3 is.
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