The great merger: why billionaires are getting in our heads

In mid-August, it became known that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman intends to back Merge Labs, a company that is developing a brain-computer interface - a class of technology that allows people to control computers using neural signals from the brain, i.e., actually by the power of thought. This further intensifies competition with his former partner and now rival Elon Musk, who launched a similar startup, Neuralink, in 2016. So far, the technology is being used with the noble goal of helping completely paralyzed people to communicate with the world around them again by controlling computer interfaces. However, both billionaires believe that in the long run, this technology will literally save humanity from extinction.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman were once partners and co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit company that was to responsibly develop computer AI. However, the partners parted ways in 2018 and had a serious falling out in 2024, to the point of litigation.

As Forbes notes in its article, in addition to the direct clash of their newest AI - Grok 4 from Musk and GPT 5 from OpenAI, Sam Altman is gradually building structures around his company that threaten other areas of the competitor's business. For example, it has become known that OpenAI is considering creating its own social network.

"We've been told there is an internal prototype focused on generating ChatGPT images with a social feed. According to our sources, CEO Sam Altman has been privately gathering third-party feedback on the project," The Verge wrote in April.

OpenAI's entry into the social networking market could pose a serious threat to X, says Forbes - according to Statista, X has 600 million monthly users, while OpenAI claims ChatGPT is more popular - it has 700 million users, and not per month, but per week.

OpenAI's partnership with robotaxi maker Glydways was announced in May, and in June with drone car software developer Applied Intuition - these are potential competitors to Tesla's robotaxis.

Musk's SpaceX is the world leader in launching satellites into space? No problem, Altman supports an alternative, Longshot Space, a company that plans to send vehicles into orbit from a giant cannon (seriously).

And finally, it's the turn to acquire competitor Neuralink. According to the Financial Times, Altman is set to back startup Merge Labs, which is seeking $250 million in funding at a total valuation of $850 million. The company aims to take advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence and genetic editing of cells to create more useful brain-computer interfaces. Two of the newspaper's sources said Altman will help launch the project with Alex Blania, who runs World, an eyeball scanning startup using digital identity technology.

In June, Neuralink raised another round of funding of $650 million, at a total valuation of about $9 billion, Semafor wrote, citing its sources.

Bloomberg has learned that the company told investors in a presentation that it plans to open five major clinics to install its brain implants within six years and perform at least 20,000 surgeries a year by 2031, earning about $1 billion.

Ambitious, considering that Musk's company has less than a dozen patients so far: in late July, Audrey Crews, who has been paralyzed after an accident for more than 20 years, announced on social network X that she was the ninth patient and the first woman to receive a Neuralink implant. Her post, in which she showed how, for the first time in 20 years, she was able to write her name in a computer with her mind, garnered almost 3 million views.

On the other hand, Merge Labs has only an idea so far: according to Bloomberg, the company intends to genetically modify some brain cells to then record and stimulate their activity using ultrasound. This section of science is called sonogenetics, and the attempt to combine ultrasound with gene therapy "could take years," the agency notes.

According to the April MIT Technology Review, in addition to Neuralink, New York-based Synchron and China's Neuracle Neuroscience are developing brain-computer interfaces. Synchron uses a stent with electrodes (stentrod) that is inserted into a brain vessel through a vein in the neck. It's a gentler technology than Neuralink's - to install Musk's chip, you have to drill into the skull and run thin electrodes directly into the brain. However, Synchron's technology has disadvantages - Stentrod collects a limited amount of information, so it only gives the user a basic on/off control signal, or what Synchron calls a "switch." This is not enough for a paralyzed person to use Photoshop, but enough to switch between program menus or select preset messages.

Chinese Neuracle Neuroscience in the beginning of 2025 published a brief report from which it follows that thanks to 8 electrodes placed epidurally (i.e. in the space between the skull and the brain sheath), a paralyzed patient successfully controlled a mechanical "arm" of an exoskeleton placed on top of a human arm. And what is more, thanks to this training, after 9 months, his mobility and his living arm improved as well.

According to MIT Technology Review, Synchron now has 10 patients - more than other companies in this field, while Neuracle Neuroscience does not disclose data on the number of patients. According to the magazine's calculations, there are about 35 people with computer implants of various types living in the world.

Founded in 2021, the startup Precision Neuroscience offers its own solution - something intermediate between the Neuralink and Synchron approaches. The computer-brain interface they have developed is a thin film that can be placed directly on the surface of the brain through a small incision in the skull. The method is expected to provide sufficiently high sensitivity without damaging cells with electrodes. In April this year, Precision Neuroscience received approval from the U.S. regulator FDA for commercial use and placement of its interface in the brain for up to 30 days, the number of patients the company refused to disclose, writes Business Insider.

However, both Musk and Altman seem to see the idea of a computer-brain interface as something much bigger than just a way to make money.

"So you read the right books as a child" - sometimes it seems that these lines from Vladimir Vysotsky's "Ballad of Struggle" are not about Soviet children of the post-war generation, but about Silicon Valley tech tycoons.

I've already mentioned the British science fiction writer Ian Banks, who starting in the late 1980s wrote a series of novels about "The Culture," a future civilization made up of humans and artificial intelligences.

As The Economist notes, the idea of the brain-sprouting computer interface described in these books - neural lace - clearly inspired Musk when he founded Neuralink. "This isn't the first time Musk has drawn inspiration from Banks' work. SpaceX, the rocket firm he founded in 2002, owns two ocean-going barges that serve as mobile landing pads for his rockets. One is called "Just Read the Instructions," the other is called "Of Course I Still Love You." Both are named after the intelligent spaceships from the Culture books," the magazine says.

In 2015, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Banks' novel "The Gambler" as the theme of his book club. In 2017, he even launched his own project to create a Building 8 neurointerface, but, however, he abandoned the idea four years later.

We don't know if Sam Altman has read the Culture books (I think he has), but back in 2017, while co-founding a then-unknown little company called OpenAI, he wrote on his blog that humanity essentially has two paths - either create an artificial superintelligence and then disappear through evolution like the dinosaurs went extinct, or master "merge" and team up with computer AI.

Musk, in general, thinks along similar lines. In his opinion, for an electronic super-intelligence, humans will be like pets at best. He also sees a way out in the merger of humans and computers. "If we can create a high-speed neural interface with your digital self - you are no longer a house cat," Business Insider quoted him as saying.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor