Key Takeaways:
- OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, is competing against Elon Musk’s Neuralink by leading a $250 million funding round for Merge Labs.
- Merge Labs’ objective is consistent with Altman’s long-standing vision of combining human and artificial intelligence, which he titled “The Merge” in 2017.
- Altman and Musk’s rivalry is escalating beyond AI software into a new battleground, the race to dominate brain-implant technology.
Sam Altman vs. Elon Musk: Building Next Gen Superhuman AI-Tech
Tech billionaires Sam Altman and Elon Musk are set to compete once again, but not in the race for defining the best artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot or Large Language Models (LLMs), but on a new frontier, the human brain. As reported by Finance Times, OpenAI plans to lead a substantial fundraising round for Merge Labs, a new brain-computer interface (BCI) business that will compete directly with Musk’s pioneering company, Neuralink.
The deal would see OpenAI lead a $250 million funding round for the new venture at a reported valuation of $850 million. While sources have cautioned that discussions are still in their early stages and terms could change, the move signals a clear intention from Altman to challenge Musk in the high-stakes race to develop brain implant technology. The new startup is also reportedly working with Alex Blania, who runs Tools for Humanity, the company behind Altman’s other ambitious project, Worldcoin.
Merge Labs would be a direct competitor to Neuralink, having been created in 2016 and conducting its first human trial in February 2024, with the goal of allowing paralyzed people to operate gadgets with their thoughts. Neuralink recently raised $600 million for a whopping $9 billion value.
The name of the new venture, Merge Labs, appears to be a deliberate nod to a 2017 blog post by Altman titled “The Merge,” in which he speculated on the inevitable fusion of human and artificial intelligence. “The merge has already started, and we are a few years in,” he wrote at the time, predicting it was “probably going to happen sooner than most people think”.
The move represents a significant deepening of the rift between the two tech leaders. Musk, a former co-founder of OpenAI, has become a fierce rival of Altman since his departure in 2018. Their rivalry has defined the contemporary AI environment, with OpenAI’s market-leading ChatGPT facing Musk’s xAI and its chatbot, Grok. Musk and Altman have exchanged numerous tweets against each other.
Nonetheless, Musk and Altman agree when it comes to merging AI with human capacity. However, their views differ slightly; for instance, Musk sees brain implants as a necessary evolution to bridge human cognition with AI, mitigate existential risks, and unlock superhuman abilities. But Altman sees the fusion as unavoidable and is funding ventures such as Merge Labs to develop this future, positioning it as a complementary path to mind-AI integration. Now, with the reported backing of Merge Labs, their battle is set to evolve from the future of software to the very future of humanity itself.
