I'm in devices. In pharma you need way more. In devices we do a lot of In vitro work, cadaver work, etc. so animals is just the final stage of that. For drugs you need for more admittedly, but it's usually rabbits and mice you need in high quantities, not monkeys. Usually you do a bunch or rabbits, and then just one or two monkeys to verify. I've never heard of anything close to 1500 monkeys for a product that isn't even on the market.
Read the article. Of the 1,500, 280 are "sheep, pigs and monkeys." The rest are presumably mice. The only specific figure for monkeys is the claim that "two monkeys" were involved in experiments marred by human errors.
This is still way way more than is typical. For context I've worked on artificial hearts where they did a few dozen sheep and pigs before going to human implants, some other devices where you do 5 or 10. Never hundreds just to not even get there yet.
The first artificial hearts were implanted in the 1960's. I think the point I'm trying to make is that Neuralink is doing a huge amount basic science / R&D in addition to trying to get a product into FDA. In their final FDA application, it sounds like (from the article) that they'll have data from ~100 animals. That doesn't mean that the other animals were wasted - it's more that the 100 animals for the FDA are wasted in the sense that they're tested on the pristine final product rather than all the steps before.
Typically work like this gets published, shared, talked about publicly exactly so our collective understanding is improved. Presented on at clinical and scientific conferences, etc. What Neuralink is doing looks completely different than this. It's clearly being run like many of his other endeavors. With a significant disrespect for regulators, for the health of the general public, etc.
AFAIK nobody has been injured due to Tesla FSD, so not exactly sure how that qualifies either.
Actual self-driving cars will save thousands of lives, so (to me) Tesla being the only company that is pursuing it in a way that might actually get there before the end of the decade says they care more about the health of the general public, not less.
The last time I saw the statistics, Tesla autopilot was about average for US drivers, but it's actual usage was biased towards the roads least likely to cause fatalities.
I'm all in favour of the vision behind self-driving cars, but the reality isn't quite as impressive as I'd like, especially given the AI has inherent advantages such as "no blind spot" and "can pay full attention to everything all at the same time" and "not distracted by adverts, hunger, and phone" and "doesn't get tired or drunk".
And — at risk of displaying the limits of my domain knowledge — I think the AI can be tested without being in charge, by asking the AI to create a model of the world as it drives, and/or by testing its predictions of what it will observe in the next few seconds.
