Sam Altman is stepping into Elon Musk’s territory with a new venture called Merge Labs, a startup aiming to build brain-computer interfaces. According to the Financial Times, the company is looking to raise $250 million at a valuation of around $850 million, with a big chunk of the money expected to come from OpenAI’s venture arm. Altman won’t be running the day-to-day operations but he is listed as a co-founder alongside Alex Blania, who also leads Worldcoin, another project backed by Altman.
The idea behind Merge Labs is to explore how artificial intelligence can be directly integrated with human brains, an area where Musk’s Neuralink has already been making headlines. Neuralink has pushed ahead with brain implants designed to restore lost senses and help people interact with machines through thought, and it even began its first human trials earlier this year. That makes Altman’s move especially interesting, because it sets up a direct rivalry between two of the most visible figures in the tech world.
Altman has hinted at this direction before. Years ago, he wrote about the concept of “the merge,” where human intelligence and AI eventually blend in ways that change how we live and think. His new company looks like a continuation of that idea, but with a more practical edge, taking brain-machine interfaces out of theory and into development. As The Debrief points out, Merge Labs is positioning itself as part of a new wave of startups racing to make this technology mainstream.
Meanwhile, Neuralink isn’t standing still. Musk’s company is already testing its implants with the goal of proving safety and showing how the devices can restore function for people with disabilities. As The Times notes, the company has developed surgical robots and AI systems to precisely insert implants, betting that this combination will push them ahead of any competitors.
With Altman and Musk now heading down similar paths, the competition could spark faster progress—or raise new concerns about what it means to blur the line between humans and machines. Either way, the race to merge our brains with AI just became a lot more personal.
