The annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference ended Wednesday with the first recipient of Elon Musk’s experimental brain chip moving chess pieces with his mind in a match with a master playing from Sweden before a live audience at the Montage in Deer Valley.
The conference also ended a three-year run in Park City to return for its 25th year in 2026 to Aspen, where it began in 2001.
The three-day conference, which this year leaned heavily into AI topics, finished with Nolan Arbaugh, paralyzed from the shoulders since an accident in 2016, rolling onstage and talking about the effects of his brain implant and new lease on life at 31.
The Yuma, Arizona, resident’s cybernetic connection to a computer is not artificially intelligent, but he said he was amazed at how it anticipates his thought commands.
Before the implant of the brain-computer interface, which includes 64 threads with 16 electrodes in each thread focused on his motor cortex correlated with right hand movement, life wasn’t, well, exactly full of zest.
“I would stay up at all hours of the night, then just sleeping whenever, wake up whenever I wanted to because I didn’t have anything planned,” he said.
The interface allowed him to wake up each morning “just really excited about what the next day would bring. It has changed what I’m able to do and what I thought I might not ever do again,” he said. “I’ve gone back to school. I started working. I’ve started traveling again.”
The journey began with a buddy’s phone call.
“I had no idea what Neuralink was,” he said. The friend said, “You want to get a chip in your head?” he remembered. “I said, I’ve got nothing better to do, so I applied over the phone with him.”
The surgery came four months later, in January 2024.
“My whole reason for doing it was just to help people,” he said. “From the beginning, I knew that if it worked, if it didn’t, whatever the case may be, I would be helping someone. They would learn something.”
His implant enables him to run his laptop with his mind.
“So generally, what you all can do on a computer, I can do as well,” he said.
He had no pain after the two-hour robotic surgery. “I didn’t even take a Tylenol,” he said. Some of the threads moved, but some tweaking of software adjusted the connection with his interface.
About a dozen people have had similar implants since, he said.
He said the interface has changed how he imagined the future and what is possible.
“You know, all my neurons are still firing up there. There’s just sort of a break in my spinal cord where all the signals can’t get through,” he said.
He was surprised with how quickly the interface could pick up on what he was going to do next.
“I guess it made me think, wow, this thing is actually a much bigger deal than I thought it was at first,” he said. “It’s completely changed what I think about with how people are going to interact with technology.”
And it made him fascinated enough to pursue a degree in neuroscience.
For the audience at the conference, though, it was time for a chess match arranged by Chess.com. He played to a near draw with master Anna Cramling, who was playing from Sweden. It was not a level board, as he got some help through handicapping to even up the odds.
It turns out that he’s a chess enthusiast and the game has helped him navigate life after the implant, according to Chess.com. They brought him, a regular player on the site, to Paris as a special guest last year for the speed chess championship finals.
Musk’s company Neuralink uses an older concept in a new way with the surgical implants in the human brain. But experiments with animals began in the 1960s, and a human brain-computer interface was first implanted in 2004. The concept is to translate electrical signals in the brain into computer commands.
For Arbaugh, it means a future. More immediately, though, he had class homework to do after this presentation.