Sam Altman’s next startup eyes using sound waves to read your brain

This is an excerpt from Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, delivered only to The Verge subscribers once a week.

Sam Altman has tapped Mikhail Shapiro, an award-winning biomolecular engineer, to join brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs, which he and co-founder Alex Blania are expected to announce soon.

While Shapiro’s official title is unclear, sources say he will be part of Merge’s founding team and is positioning himself as a key leader in investor negotiations. These discussions are ongoing, but Merge hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from OpenAI and others, like The Financial Times reported earlier.

Shapiro’s hiring speaks volumes about the technical direction Altman is taking with Merge. His engineering laboratory at Caltech has pioneered several biomolecular technological advances, with a particular emphasis on non-invasive neural imaging and control techniques. He 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 on gene therapy to make cells visible to ultrasound, supporting an earlier study. Bloomberg report that Merge is considering this approach for its first product. Neither Shapiro nor a spokesperson for Altman and Blania could be reached for comment.

At a recent conference, Shapiro explained how sound waves and magnetic fields can be used to create a brain-computer interface. Rather than sticking electrodes into brain tissue, he said it was “easier to introduce genes into cells” that change them to respond to ultrasound. He said he was “on a mission to develop ways to interface with neurons in the brain and cells elsewhere in the body that would be less invasive.”

Altman also said recently that he didn’t like Neuralink’s invasive approach. At an August press dinner I attended, he said he “certainly wouldn’t plant something in my brain” that would kill neurons the way Neuralink’s interface does. “I wish I could think of something and have ChatGPT answer it,” he said. “Maybe I want a reading alone. That seems like a reasonable thing.”

When Merge Labs is announced in the coming weeks, I would expect Altman to be president but not play a day-to-day role, as he does with co-founder Blania of their other company, the eye-scanning orb startup called Tools for Humanity. “A popular topic in Silicon Valley is what year humans and machines will merge (or, alternatively, what year humans will be overtaken by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species),” Altman wrote in 2017. “Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075.”