is a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
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.