About PL Neuro Salons

PL Neuro Salons are a series of small, invite-only meetings whose purpose is to accelerate the development of next generation technologies – like neural augmentation and human-like AI – in a manner that is targeted to benefit humanity. Toward this goal, PL Neuro Salons bring together a deliberately cross-disciplinary group of scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and philanthropists with technical expertises across multiple disciplines of neuroscience and AI.

The PL Neuro Salon 2025: Scaled human neural data towards a science of intelligence

Human neural interface technology is at a turning point with significant investment in new devices and companies each year. As these devices enter clinical trials, large-scale human neural data collection is on the near-term horizon. This provides the opportunity to collect sufficient data to unlock insights about how brains compute that transcend biology and inform a substrate-independent “science of intelligence”. This, in turn, would qualitatively expand the capacities of next generation neurotechnologies, hastening their development, commercialization, and adoption.

Ensuring this outcome, however, requires an alignment of priorities across key stakeholders in the field such that the human neural data that is collected is useful not only for the clinical goals of current neural interface companies, but also for pushing forward intelligence science.

Thus, PL Neuro Salon 2025 is built around the following set of questions:

  1. What kinds of human neural data are most valuable for understanding intelligence and unlocking next generation neurotechnologies?

  2. What developments in the neural interface field are required to collect such data at scale?

  3. What modeling tools and theoretical frameworks do we need to extract insight from scaled data?

  4. How should we structure the ecosystem – funding, policy, talent development, and institutions – to support this progress?

The answers to these questions can shape the neurotechnology ecosystem such that human capability itself may be transformed in the coming years. In addition, these questions must be asked and answered through the lens of promoting and ensuring human dignity, autonomy, and flourishing.

What to expect

This is a working meeting, not a conference.

The Salon will commence with a series of keynotes that frame the current state of neuroscience, neurotechnology, and AI. The core working sessions comprise short introductory framing remarks followed by breakout discussions focused on specific sub-topics. The goal is to clarify open problems, test assumptions, and surface areas of potential alignment. The rest of the schedule is designed to leave room for informal conversations and creative thinking.

There are no required presentations unless previously arranged.

Before the retreat

We ask all participants to read the Program and Attendee document in advance. It provides greater depth on the program and its scientific rationale as well as the intended outcomes of the retreat. It also lists the Salon attendees.