This is an excerpt from Alex Heath SourcesA newsletter about artificial intelligence and the tech industry, distributed only to The Verge subscribers once a week.
Sam Altman has invited Mikhail Shapiro, an award-winning biomolecular engineer, to join the brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs, which he plans to announce soon with co-founder Alex Blania.
While Shapiro's official position is unclear, sources say he will be part of Merge's founding team and is positioned as a key leader in negotiations with investors. Those talks are ongoing, but Merge expects to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from OpenAI and other companies. Financial Times previously reported.
Shapiro's hiring is in many ways indicative of the technical direction Altman is taking with Merge. His engineering laboratory at Caltech has pioneered several advances in biomolecular technologies, with a particular focus on noninvasive neural imaging and monitoring techniques. He particularly focused on using ultrasound to interact with the human brain without the need for open-skull surgery such as Neuralink.
He has also done extensive work in gene therapy to make cells visible to ultrasound, confirming earlier discoveries. Bloomberg Merge is reportedly considering this approach for its first product. Neither Shapiro nor a representative for Altman and Blania could be reached for comment.
During recent conversationShapiro talked about how sound waves and magnetic fields can be used to create a brain-computer interface. Instead of sticking electrodes into brain tissue, he says, “it's easier to put genes into the cells” that modify them to respond to ultrasound. He said he was on a “mission to develop ways to interact with neurons in the brain and cells in other parts of the body that are less invasive.”
Altman also recently stated that he doesn't like Neuralink's invasive approach. IN press dinner in August which I attendedhe said he “definitely wouldn't plant something in my brain” that would kill neurons the way the Neuralink interface does. “I would like to be able to think about something and have ChatGPT respond,” he said. “Maybe I need read-only mode. That seems like a reasonable thing to do.”
When Merge Labs is announced in the coming weeks, I expect Altman to be chairman, but not play a day-to-day role like he does with co-founder Blania at their other company. Eyeball scanning startup called Tools for Humanity. “A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talk about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will be surpassed by rapidly improving AI or genetically enhanced species),” Altman wrote in 2017. “Most assumptions seem to be between 2025 and 2075.”
