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.

The company aims to raise $250 million from OpenAI and other investors, although the talks are at an early stage. Altman will not personally invest.

The new venture would be in direct competition with Neuralink, founded by Musk in 2016, which seeks to wire brains directly to computers.

Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI, but Musk left the board in 2018 after clashing with Altman, and the two have since become fierce rivals in their pursuit of AI.

Musk launched his own AI start-up, xAI, in 2023 and has been attempting to block OpenAI’s conversion from a nonprofit in the courts. Musk donated much of the initial capital to get OpenAI off the ground.

Neuralink is one of a pack of so-called brain-computer interface companies, while a number of start-ups, such as Precision Neuroscience and Synchron, have also emerged on the scene.

Neuralink earlier this year raised $650 million at a $9 billion valuation, and it is backed by investors including Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, and Vy Capital. Altman had previously invested in Neuralink.

Brain implants are a decades-old technology, but recent leaps forward in AI and in the electronic components used to collect brain signals have offered the prospect that they can become more practically useful.

Altman has backed a number of other companies in markets adjacent to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which is valued at $300 billion. In addition to cofounding World, he has also invested in the nuclear fission group Oklo and nuclear fusion project Helion.

OpenAI declined to comment.