OpenAI, cofounder Sam Altman to take on Neuralink with new startup

OpenAI and its cofounder Sam Altman are preparing to back a company that will compete with Elon Musk’s Neuralink by connecting human brains with computers, heightening the rivalry between the two billionaire entrepreneurs.

The new venture, called Merge Labs, is raising new funds at an $850 million valuation, with much of the new capital expected to come from OpenAI’s ventures team, according to three people with direct knowledge of the plans.

Altman has encouraged the investment and will help launch the project alongside Alex Blania, who runs World, an eyeball-scanning digital ID project also backed by the OpenAI chief, said two of the people.

Altman will cofound the company but not have a day-to-day role in the new project, they added.

Merge is one of a slate of young companies looking to take advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence to build more useful brain-computer interfaces.

Its name comes from what many in Silicon Valley describe as “the merge,” a moment when humans and machines come together.

Altman wrote a lengthy blog post on the topic in 2017, speculating that moment could come as soon as 2025. This year, he suggested in another blog post that we could soon have “high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces” as a result of recent technological advances.