August 13, 2023, news, according to the British newspaper Financial Times, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is supporting a startup brain-computer interface company,in direct competition with Musk’s company Neuralink in the same field.
Three anonymous sources told The Information that Merge Labs, the start-up, recently valued itself at $850 million ( current exchange rate is about 6.11 billion yuan), with much of the funding expected to come from OpenAI’s venture arm.
Two people with knowledge of the matter said that SamOrtman not only encouraged the investment,but also launched the project with Worldcoin’s head, Alex Brania,and Ortman will be a co-founder of Merge Labs, but will not be involved in day-to-day operations.
Merge Labs is committed to creating more practical brain-computer interfaces using AI, its name is derived from the popular concept “The Merge” in Silicon Valley,which roughly means the moment when humans and robots are finally combined.
Ortman had previously written a long piece in 2017 speculating that the “merger of human and machine” could arrive as soon as 2025. This year, he wrote in a blog post thathumanity may soon be able to invent a “high-bandwidth brain-machine interface”.
Merge Labs also plans to raise $250 million from OpenAI and other investors, though those talks are still in early stages, Altman said.
OpenAI declined to comment on the matter.
Looking back at history, Elon Musk and Sam Altman can be considered “lovers and haters”,the two once worked together to found OpenAI, but in 2018 Musk left the board due to disagreements with Altman, and since then, the two have been in fierce competition in the AI field.
And Musk’s Neuralink brain-computer interface company was founded in 2016 and currently claims to maintain a “leading position” among its peers. At the beginning of this year, Neuralink completed a $650 million financing at a valuation of $9 billion, with investors including Sequoia Capital and Coatue Management,Altman had previously invested in Neuralink.