Six years ago, I asked Sam Altman at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco how OpenAI, with its complicated corporate structure, would make money. He said that someday, he’d ask the AI. When everyone snickered, he added, “You can laugh. It’s all right. But it really is what I actually believe.”
He wasn’t kidding.
Sitting again in front of an audience, this time across Max Hodak, the co-founder and CEO of Science Corp., I can’t help but remember that moment with Altman. Pale-complexioned Hodak, wearing jeans and a black zip-up sweatshirt, looks more like he’s going to jump into a mosh pit than pitch a company valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. But he’s got a sly sense of humor that keeps the room engaged.
Hodak started programming when he was six, and as an undergraduate at Duke, he worked his way into the lab of Miguel Nicolelis, a pioneering neuroscientist who has since become publicly critical of commercial brain-computer interface ventures. In 2016, Hodak co-founded Neuralink with Elon Musk, serving as its president and essentially running day-to-day operations until 2021.
When I ask what he learned working alongside Musk, Hodak describes a specific pattern. “We got into lots of situations together where something would happen. In my mind, I’d have two diametrically opposed possible solutions, and I would bring them to him, and I’d be like, ‘Is it A or B?’ And he’d look at it and be like, ‘It’s definitely B,’ and the problem would never come back.”
After a few years of this, Hodak took what he’d learned and roped in three former Neuralink colleagues to launch Science Corp. about four years ago. Like Altman, Hodak describes his team’s improbable goal so placidly that I find myself believing that the limits of cognition are about to be overcome sooner than most of us realize. And that he’ll be among those who make it happen.
As I was doomscrolling…
While I’ve been consumed with the AI data center craziness and the talent poaching wars, momentum has been building in the background.
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According to World Economic Forum data, nearly 700 companies around the world have at least some ties to brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, including some tech giants. In addition to Neuralink, Microsoft Research has run a dedicated BCI project for the last seven years. Apple partnered earlier this year with Synchron, backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, to create a protocol that lets BCIs control iPhones and iPads. Even Altman is reportedly helping to stand up a Neuralink rival.
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