He told the Wall Street Journal he's a bit worried about how safe Neuralink tech is, which has everyone yakking about the ethics of plugging computers into our noggins.

On the Wall Street Journal's podcast "The Future of Everything," Rapoport, a neurosurgeon, admitted to giving his all to pushing neural interfaces from the lab bench to the clinic. But he's dead set on making sure it's all safe as houses when you mix new tech with medicine. After bidding Neuralink adieu, he's gone off to start Precision Neuroscience.

"I've pretty much devoted my entire professional life to bringing neural interfaces from the world of science to the world of medicine," Rapoport told the WSJ's Danny Lewis. "But I felt that to move to the world of medicine and technology, safety is paramount."

Rapoport's natter suggests there's a bit of a tiff at Neuralink over how deep they should be digging into our grey matter. He's not too chuffed with Neuralink's method, which involves popping tiny electrodes in the brain to nick data. He reckons that's asking for trouble, what with the risk of brain damage.

Now he's the top dog at Precision Neuroscience and bigging up less invasive surface electrodes, which he reckons are a lot safer than Neuralink's brain-poking microelectrodes.

"For a medical device, safety often implies minimal invasiveness," he explained. "And in the early days of brain-computer interfaces, there was this notion that to extract information-rich data from the brain, one needed to penetrate the brain with tiny little needle-like electrodes."

Rapoport is not shy about the hefty implanting some BCI outfits are doing. He says they might do the job, but they could leave you with a bit of brain damage when they shove them in. He's convinced there has to be a less damaging way.

He's all about nicking the good stuff from the brain without messing it up, and Precision Neuroscience is aiming for that.

He points out that Neuralink is all about these invasive microelectrodes, but Precision is playing a different game. "The Precision system is based on surface microelectrodes, which are tiny little electrodes that coat the surface of the brain without penetrating it."

The stark difference between the two is in how they get their kit into your noggin. Neuralink uses implantable chips the size of a 10p piece. They must chop a bit of your skull out to fit the chip, which gets tucked into the brain cavity. They've been honing this method since starting animal tests a few years ago.

The first human got one of Musk's brain chips this January.

On the flip side, Precision Neuroscience is all about keeping the surgery on the downlow. As Rapoport joked on the podcast, they just make a teeny cut in the scalp and an even tinier one in the skull. It's no biggie.