{"id":228,"date":"2025-05-24T03:22:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T23:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/valve-ceo-gabe-newells-neuralink-competitor-is-expecting-its-first-brain-chip-this-year\/"},"modified":"2025-05-24T03:22:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T23:22:10","slug":"valve-ceo-gabe-newells-neuralink-competitor-is-expecting-its-first-brain-chip-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/valve-ceo-gabe-newells-neuralink-competitor-is-expecting-its-first-brain-chip-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Valve CEO Gabe Newell\u2019s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Valve CEO Gabe Newell pretends to get a hole drilled into his head for a brain-computer interface.<\/figcaption><\/p><\/figure>\n

Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, the company behind Half-Life<\/em> and DOTA 2<\/em> and Counter-Strike<\/em> and preeminent PC game distribution platform Steam, has long toyed with the idea that your brain should be more connected to your PC. It began over a decade ago<\/a> with in-house psychologists studying people\u2019s biological responses to video games; Valve once considered earlobe monitors<\/a> for its first VR headset. The company publicly explored the idea of brain-computer interfaces for gaming<\/a> at GDC in 2019.<\/p>\n

But Newell decided to spin off the idea. That same year, he quietly incorporated<\/a> a new brain-computer interface startup, Starfish Neuroscience \u2014 which has now revealed plans to produce its very first brain chip later this year.<\/p>\n

Starfish\u2019s first blog post<\/a>, spotted by Valve watcher Brad Lynch<\/a>, makes it clear we\u2019re not talking about a complete implant yet. This bit is the custom \u201celectrophysiology\u201d chip designed to record brain activity (like how Neuralink can \u201cread your mind\u201d so patients can interact with computers) and stimulate the brain (for disease therapy), but Starfish isn\u2019t claiming it\u2019s already built the systems to power it or the bits to stick it into a person\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe anticipate our first chips arriving in late 2025 and\u00a0we are interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip would open new and exciting avenues<\/strong>,\u201d writes Starfish neuroengineer Nate Cermak (bolding theirs), suggesting that Starfish might wind up partnering with other companies for wireless power or even the final brain implant. <\/p>\n

But the goal, writes Starfish, is a smaller and less invasive implant than the competition, one that can \u201cenable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions\u201d instead of just one site, and one that doesn\u2019t require a battery. Using just 1.1 milliwatts during \u201cnormal recording,\u201d Starfish says it can work with wireless power transmission instead.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the chip\u2019s current spec sheet:<\/p>\n