Neuralink has set a new brain-computer interface record of 11.32 bits per second for cursor control, after training on more than 50,000 hours of neural recordings from its clinical trial participants.

The Elon Musk-founded company said in an October 1 blog post that participants have streamed over 50,000 hours of unlabeled neural data since the trial began two years ago. Its first participant alone recorded more than 9,000 hours, or 22.4 billion neural spikes.

Neuralink used the dataset to pretrain self-supervised neural encoders that turn noisy brain signals into stable representations. The company says some decoders now work for weeks rather than days, and daily calibration fell from about 10 minutes a day to 10 minutes a week for some users.

The company says the 11.32-bit result exceeds the performance of most able-bodied people, though the comparison has not been independently verified.

Why it matters: longer-lasting decoders bring brain-computer interfaces closer to everyday use for paralysed patients.