OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman is taking his ambitions beyond artificial intelligence with Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup positioning itself as a direct rival to Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Merge is among a new wave of startups leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence to develop more usable and effective BCIs. The new venture has already reached a valuation of $850 million despite not yet fully launching, according to the Financial Times on August 12.
From Bitcoin investors to leading tech and AI billionaires, it was only a matter of time before OpenAI and its co-founder, Sam Altman, would step into the realm of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), pledging to rival Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Sam Altman: When Humans “Merge” with Machines
Altman’s interest in BCIs is longstanding. In 2017, he published a blog post titled “The Merge,” where he wrote: “People used to call this the singularity; now it feels uncomfortable and real enough that many seem to avoid naming it at all.”
He also speculated about when such a merge might occur: “A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075.”
Altman noted that Silicon Valley insiders often use “the merge” to describe the convergence of humans and machines. “Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word ‘singularity’ is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process. And gradual processes are hard to notice,” he wrote.
While some of his comments are more cautionary, they also reflect his conviction that such changes are inevitable. “More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves.”
Altman described the human-AI merge in various forms: “The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario.”
Avoiding Conflict
Altman went on to muse that two different species will inevitably come into conflict if, for instance, they both aim to become the dominant species on the planet, noting that “We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else.”
At the time, Altman wrote that the “merge” he envisioned had already begun, although he said he expected it would eventually “get a lot weirder.”
“We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants,” Altman said, guessing that one option could be that humans serve more as the “biological bootloader for digital intelligence” that may one day be subsumed into the branches of the evolutionary tree, although pressing that a better option for our species would be to “figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
Merge Labs will now face direct competition with Musk’s Neuralink and other implant-focused companies such as Synchron, setting it apart from non-implantable BCI efforts.
Musk and Altman’s rivalry runs deep: the two originally co-founded OpenAI, but Musk left the board in 2018 following disputes with Altman. Since then, they have emerged as fierce competitors in the race for AI dominance, and now in the race for BCIs.
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com.