Yeah, I mean we've been working on brain implants of various stripes for a couple decades now, and they're not the first to attempt motor cortex implants for paralyzed patients as a method to begin human trials, but the current state of the art for brain implants is honestly pretty... primitive. There's no good way to avoid damaging neurons, so it's mainly a focus on not causing too much damage while fine mapping and targeting has to be done on an individual basis.

Implants are hugely useful, and arguably the current state of the art treatment for several conditions (epilepsy and parkinsons), but we're so far out from computer brain interfaces being useful for anything outside of dire medical needs that it's kinda surprising they're pushing ahead when they had so much trouble with their experimental subjects.

I worked in a brain imaging lab in college, and we had a couple of chimpanzees with brain implants that did daily research protocols. Bastards were better than me at the testing regimen, and other than some minor discomfort (water intake is restricted prior to the tests so that the gatorade reward was more attractive), they were large children that could tear your face off if they got angry. Once they got older, they would have surgery to remove the implants and retire to a primate ranch where they just got to live out the rest of their life. All of the grad students there had been working with the same chimps for years, so it's a little alarming Neuralink had so many issues.

It doesn't exactly engender confidence.