Sam Altman is poised to co-found a brain chip startup funded by OpenAI’s venture team to take on nemesis Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the latest antagonism in the billionaires’ escalating feud.
The new company, Merge Labs, hopes to raise $250 million in funding that would set its valuation at $850 million in its pursuit of using artificial intelligence (AI) for a brain-computer interface. It would compete directly with Neuralink, as well as specialists in the field such as Precision Neuroscience and Synchron, according to a report in the Financial Times.
Altman would start Merge Labs with Alex Blania of World, an eyeball-scanning digital-ID company also backed by OpenAI. Altman, who is OpenAI’s CEO, will not have a day-to-day role in the new project, the report said.
OpenAI had no comment on the report.
The genesis of the startup’s name derives from something Altman said in 2017, and is commonly used in Silicon Valley. He said “the merge” describes the moment when human brains and computers come together. He recently wrote in a blog post that a “high-bandwidth brain-computer interface” could soon be developed with recent advances in tech.
Mind-link technology has been around for decades, but advances in AI and implant technology now let researchers collect and process higher signal levels from the brain.
Merge Labs is likely to exacerbate ill will between Altman and Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in late 2015 before Musk left the board in 2018 following a dispute over company strategy. (Musk founded Neuralink in 2016 with Altman as an investor; he launched xAI, a rival to OpenAI, in 2023 and continues to attempt to block OpenAI’s conversion from a non-profit in the courts.)
Earlier this year, Neuralink hauled in $650 million in funding, giving it a $9 billion valuation, through the financial backing of Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, and Vy Capital.
The company started its first human trials in January 2024 with a quadriplegic and later implanted its tech into a second person. That subject has been able to play first person shooter games and create 3-D designs.
