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Source: Precision Neuroscience

It happened so fast that Craig Mermel missed it. 

He was standing in a busy operating room in West Virginia, waiting for a surgeon to place Precision Neuroscience’s neural implant system onto a conscious patient’s brain for the first time. Mermel, the president and chief product officer at Precision, said he looked away for a moment, and by the time he turned back, the company’s paper-thin electrode array was in position. 

In seconds, a real-time, high-resolution rendering of the patient’s brain activity washed over a screen. According to Precision, the system had provided the highest resolution picture of human thought ever recorded. 

“It was incredibly surreal,” Mermel said in an interview with CNBC. “The nature of the data and our ability to visualize that, you know, I got… chills.”

The procedure Mermel observed was the company’s first-ever in-human clinical study.

Founded in 2021 by a co-founder of Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface startup, Precision Neuroscience is an industry competitor working to help patients with paralysis operate digital devices by decoding their neural signals. A BCI is a system that deciphers brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies, and several companies like Synchron, Paradromics and Blackrock Neurotech have also created devices with this capability. Precision announced a $41 million Series B funding round in January.

The company’s flagship BCI system, the Layer 7 Cortical Interface, is an electrode array resembling a piece of scotch tape. Since it’s thinner than a human hair, Precision says it can conform to the brain’s surface without damaging any tissue, and in the study, Precision’s system was temporarily placed onto the brains of three patients who were already undergoing neurosurgery to have tumors removed. 

Since the technology worked as expected, future studies will explore further applications in clinical and behavioral contexts, Mermel said. If the trials go according to Precision’s plan, patients with severe degenerative diseases like ALS could eventually regain some ability to communicate with loved ones by moving cursors, typing and even accessing social media with their minds.

Although an in-human study is a major milestone, the road to market for this type of technology is a long one. Precision has not yet received FDA approval for its device, and the company will have to work closely with regulators to successfully conduct several extremely thorough rounds of testing and data safety collection.

As of June, no BCI company has managed to clinch the FDA’s final seal of approval.

“The goal is to deliver a device that can help people living with permanent disability, so this is like the first step,” Mermel said. “Now the real work begins.”

Doctors prepare Precision’s system. Precision’s array compared to a penny.

Photo: Anna von Scheling

A number of different academic medical centers offered to support the company’s pilot clinical study, according to Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, co-founder and chief science officer at Precision. The company partnered with West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, and the two organizations prepared for the procedures for more than a year in advance, Rapoport said.

Rapoport, who has been working on BCI technology for more than 20 years, said seeing Precision’s technology on the brain of a human patient for the first time was an “incredibly gratifying” milestone.

“I can’t really describe emotionally what that’s like,” he said. “It was tremendous.”

Dr. Peter Konrad, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, was the surgeon who physically placed Precision’s system onto the patients’ brains during their procedures.

Konrad said it was a simple process that felt like laying a piece of tissue paper on the brain. 

Patients had Precision’s system on their brains for 15 minutes. One of them remained asleep during the procedure, but two patients were woken up so the Layer 7 could capture their brain activity as they spoke. 

“I’ve never seen that amount of data, 1,000 channels in real-time, of electrical activity, just washing over the brain as somebody was talking,” Konrad said in an interview with CNBC. “It was literally like you’re watching somebody think. It’s pretty amazing.”

Electrodes are already used in practice to help neurosurgeons monitor brain activity during a procedure, but the resolution provided by conventional systems is low. Konrad said standard electrodes are about four millimeters big, while Precision’s array can put 500 to 1,000 contacts on that size.   

“It’s the difference between looking at the world with an old black and white camera versus seeing in hi-def,” he said.

Konrad said it is too early for the patients in this study to see the direct benefits of this technology.

Precision’s array compared to a penny.

Photo: Anna von Scheling

Precision ultimately hopes its technology will not require open brain surgery at all. In an interview with CNBC in January, co-founder and CEO Michael Mager said a surgeon should be able to implant the array by making a thin slit in the skull and sliding in the device like a letter into a letter box. The slit would be less than a millimeter thick – so small that patients don’t need their hair shaved for the procedure. 

Precision’s minimally invasive approach is intentional, as competing BCI companies like Paradromics and Neuralink have designed systems meant to be inserted directly into the brain tissue. 

Rapoport said that inserting a BCI into the brain would provide a clear picture of what each neuron is doing, but it risks damaging the tissue and is difficult to scale. He said that level of detail is not necessary to decode speech or achieve the other functions Precision is striving for, so it was a tradeoff the company was ultimately willing to make.  

In the coming weeks, Precision will carry out the same procedure with two more patients as part of its pilot clinical study. Rapoport said the company has submitted its initial results to a scientific journal, and that having the data publicly available will be a “huge next step.”

Precision also has similar studies in the works with health systems like Mount Sinai in New York City and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Rapoport said Precision is hoping to receive full FDA clearance for its first-generation device next year. 

“The early results for us are tremendously gratifying to see,” Rapoport said. “If you’re lucky, there’s a few times in your life when you get to sort of see something before anybody else sees it in the world.”

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OpenAI says it will use Google’s cloud for ChatGPT

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OpenAI says it will use Google's cloud for ChatGPT

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images

OpenAI said Wednesday that it expects to use Google’s cloud infrastructure for its popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence assistant.

The reach for additional capacity aligns with OpenAI’s desire for more computing power to meet heavy demand after initially relying exclusively on Microsoft for cloud capacity. The two companies’ relations have evolved since then, with Microsoft naming OpenAI as a competitor last year.

Both companies sell AI tools for developers and offer subscriptions to companies.

OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle.

The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon‘s and Microsoft‘s. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives.

The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.

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Last year, Oracle announced that it was partnering with Microsoft and OpenAl “to extend the Microsoft Azure Al platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” to give OpenAI additional computing power. In March, OpenAI committed to a cloud agreement with CoreWeave in a five-year deal worth nearly $12 billion.

Microsoft said in January that it had agreed to move to a model of providing the right of first refusal anytime OpenAI needs more computing resources, rather than being its exclusive vendor across the board. Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive on OpenAI’s programming interfaces.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in April that the startup, which draws on Nvidia graphics processing units to power its large language models, was facing capacity constraints.

“if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!” he wrote in an X post at the time.

Reuters reported in June that OpenAI was planning to bring on cloud capacity from Google.

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Tesla’s change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

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Tesla's change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.

CNBC

In May, Tesla changed its corporate bylaws in a way that would require investors to own 3% of the stock, today worth about $30 billion, in order to file a derivative lawsuit against the company for breach of fiduciary duties. Authorities in New York State are now asking Tesla to delete the bylaw entirely.

Overseers of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owns about 0.1% of Tesla’s shares, submitted a formal proxy proposal and letter to the company on July 11, and shared it with CNBC on Wednesday. They say that Elon Musk’s automaker engaged in a “bait-and-switch” to convince shareholders to approve an incorporation move from Delaware to Texas in June 2024.

Musk made the move after a judge in Delaware voided the $56 billion pay package that the CEO, also the world’s richest person, was granted by Tesla in 2018, the largest compensation plan in public company history. In getting shareholders to approve the change in its state of incorporation, Tesla said that stakeholders’ rights “are substantially equivalent” under the laws of Delaware and Texas.

On May 14, almost a year after Tesla’s move, Texas changed its law to allow corporations in the state to require 3% ownership before being able to carry forth a shareholder derivative suit.

“The very next day, Tesla’s board amended the Company’s bylaws to the maximum allowable 3% ownership threshold, effectively insulating the Company’s directors and officers from accountability to shareholders,” the New York letter says. The letter was signed by Gianna McCarthy, a director of corporate governance with the retirement fund, on behalf of the fund and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

Only three institutions currently own at least 3% of Tesla’s outstanding shares.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The New York fund overseers wrote that derivative actions are “the last resort for shareholders to enforce their rights” when company directors or officers violate their fiduciary obligations, and called Tesla’s decision on the matter “egregious.”

In an email to CNBC, DiNapoli said Tesla “deceived shareholders” in assuring them that their rights would remain the same in Texas.

“These actions violate basic tenets of good corporate governance and must be reversed,” he wrote.

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee's ether company and the shares are surging

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022. 

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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Bitmine (BMNR) 1-month

The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.

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