Elon Musk¡¯s brain-chip startup Neuralink livestreamed on Wednesday its first patient implanted with a chip using his mind to play online chess.

Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.

Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

¡°The surgery was super easy,¡± Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk¡¯s social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. ¡°I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments.

¡°I had basically given up playing that game,¡± Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, ¡°you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight.¡±

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is ¡°not perfect¡± and they ¡°have run into some issues.¡±

¡°I don¡¯t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there¡¯s still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life,¡± he added.

Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said what Neuralink showed was not a ¡°breakthrough.¡±

¡°It is still in the very early days post-implantation, and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject¡¯s side to maximize the amount of information for control that can be achieved,¡± he added.

Even so, Ludwig said it was a positive development for the patient that they have been able to interface with a computer in a way they were not able to before the implant. ¡°It¡¯s certainly a good starting point,¡± he said.

Last month, it was reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record keeping and quality controls for animal experiments at Elon Musk¡¯s Neuralink, less than a month after the startup said it was cleared to test its brain implants in humans. Neuralink did not respond then to questions about the FDA¡¯s inspection.