Sam Altman’s next startup Eyes uses sound waves to read your brain

This is an excerpt from Sources by Alex Heatha newsletter about artificial intelligence and the technology industry, is only distributed to The Verge subscribers once a week.

Sam Altman has hired award-winning biomolecular engineer Michael Shapiro to join brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs, which he is set to announce soon with co-founder Alex Blania.

While Shapiro’s official title is unclear, sources say he will be part of Merge’s founding team and has been positioned as a key leader in talks with investors. These talks are ongoing, but Merge expects to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from OpenAI and others Financial Times I mentioned earlier.

Shapiro’s appointment speaks volumes about the artistic direction Altman is taking with Merge. His engineering laboratory at Caltech has pioneered many advances in biomolecular technology, with a particular focus on non-invasive techniques for neuroimaging and control. He has particularly focused on using ultrasound to interact with the human brain without the need for open skull surgery like Neuralink.

He has also done extensive work in the field of gene therapy to make cells visible to ultrasound, which supports the above Bloomberg Merge reports that it is looking at this approach for its first product. Neither Shapiro nor a spokesman for Altman and Plania could be reached for comment.

During a The last talkShapiro talked about how sound waves and magnetic fields are used to create a brain-computer interface. Rather than sticking electrodes into brain tissue, he said, it is “easier to insert genes into cells” that modify them to respond to ultrasound. He said he had “made it my mission to develop ways to interact with neurons in the brain and cells elsewhere in the body that would be less invasive.”

Altman also recently said he doesn’t like Neuralink’s invasive approach. in A press dinner in August I attendedHe said he “certainly wouldn’t implant something in my brain” that would kill neurons the way the Neuralink interface does. “I’d like to be able to think of something and have ChatGPT respond to it,” he said. “Maybe I just want to read. That sounds reasonable.”

When Merge Labs is announced in the coming weeks, I expect Altman will be chairman of the board but not play a day-to-day role, as he does with co-founder Plania at their other company, A startup orbiting to scan eyeballs is called Tools for Humanity.. “A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talk of the year in which humans and machines will merge (or, if not, in what year humans will be overtaken by rapidly improving artificial intelligence or genetically enhanced species)” Altman Written in 2017. “Most guesses seem to fall between 2025 and 2075.”