Billionaire Elon Musk said on Sunday his motive for Neuralink – the company he founded to link the human brain with a machine interface – is to avoid artificial intelligence (AI) "becoming other".

A Twitter user asked the Tesla and SpaceX CEO whether his new firm was a "counter for Skynet", to which Musk replied that it was the "aspiration" behind Neuralink.

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Skynet is a fictional self-aware AI system in the "Terminator" movies that saw humans as a threat and sought to wipe them out.

Last week, Musk outlined his plans for Neuralink in an interview with website Wait But Why. The company plans to make "micron-sized devices" to achieve his goal of human-machine interfaces. Human speech is essentially a compressed version of the thoughts running through your head. Musk's plan would allow humans to communicate their direct thoughts with each other.

"If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn't need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something … But the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that's difficult to conceive of right now," Musk told Wait But Why.