The escalating feud between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his arch nemesis, Elon Musk, may soon escalate with news that the former is starting a rival brain-computer interface (BCI) company.
As the Financial Times reports, OpenAI is weighing a major investment in Merge Labs, a BCI startup seeking to become the latest Neuralink competitor by achieving $850 million valuation with the help of the company’s ventures team and other interested parties.
According to three insiders with knowledge of the potential plans, who were not named in FT so they could speak freely, Altman is slated to assist in launching Merge Labs with Alex Bania, the CEO and cofounder of the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture World.
Though Altman will be named a cofounder of Merge Labs, the OpenAI CEO will not be investing any of his own money. Though it’s a bit peculiar for OpenAI to be putting so much money into a brain chip startup, it makes a certain amount of sense given that Merge seeks to use AI advances to build better BCIs — a foundational goal of Musk’s at Neuralink.
While we don’t know much else about the project beyond its name and valuation goals, it appears that Altman has wanted to get into the BCI game for nearly as long as Musk, who founded Neuralink in 2016 while he was still at OpenAI.
Back in 2017, as FT flagged, the OpenAI cofounder speculated on his personal blog that humans may “merge” with machines — the source of the startup’s name — as soon as 2025. In that same post, Altman also pinpointed three advances that he considered inevitabilities: “superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen.”
Coming back into the present, it’s clear that both men have retained their near-identical ambitions even after Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018 following a clash with Altman about the direction of the company. Alongside his dueling roles running Tesla and SpaceX — and his legal quest to wrest back control of OpenAI — Musk also founded xAI, his rival AI lab built into the site formerly known as Twitter, in 2023.
Musk has since sued OpenAI several times, accusing the company of abandoning its non-profit origins, despite having launched his own for-profit AI company.
With Merge, Altman seems to be upping the ante between the two, though Neuralink appears to have a major head start with its $9 billion valuation.
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