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

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Sam Altman has tapped Mikhail Shapiro, an award-winning biomolecular engineer, to join the Merge Labs brain-computer interface startup he’s 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. Those talks are ongoing, but Merge expects to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from OpenAI and others, as The Financial Times earlier reported.

Shapiro’s hiring signals a lot about the technical direction Altman is taking with Merge. His engineering lab at Caltech has pioneered several advances in biomolecular tech, with a special focus on noninvasive techniques for neural imaging 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 with gene therapy to make cells visible to ultrasound, which backs up an earlier Bloomberg report that Merge is eyeing that approach for its first product. Neither Shapiro nor a spokesperson for Altman and Blania could be reached for comment.

During a recent talk, Shapiro talked about how sound waves and magnetic fields can be used to create a brain-computer interface. Rather than stick electrodes into brain tissue, he said it’s “easier to introduce genes into cells” that modify them to respond to ultrasound. He said he has made “my mission to develop ways to interface with neurons in the brain and cells elsewhere in the body that would be less invasive.”

Altman has also said recently that he doesn’t like Neuralink’s invasive approach. At a press dinner in August that I attended, he said he “would definitely not sow something to my brain” that would kill neurons like Neuralink’s interface does. “I would like to be able to think something and have ChatGPT respond to it,” he said. “Maybe I want read-only. That seems like a reasonable thing.”

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