Sam Altman’s new startup wants to merge machines and humans

If you’ve enjoyed Elon Musk’s ongoing beef with Sam Altman and OpenAI, get ready for a whole new chapter: soon they’ll be rivals not just in AI, but in brain-computer interfaces too. The Financial Times reports that Altman and OpenAI are backing a new company called Merge Labs developing brain implants, making it a pretty direct rival to Musk’s Neuralink. This has clearly been an interest of Altman’s for a while though — he wrote about “the merge” between humans and machines on his personal blog back in 2017, and connects it pretty directly to his work at OpenAI: > 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.