Sam Altman, OpenAI will reportedly back a startup that takes on Musk’s Neuralink

Tech Crunch ^ | 8-12-25 | Julie Bort

[MarlonRando]

The new company, called Merge Labs, aims to merge humans and machines together through artificial intelligence and is raising funds at a $850 million valuation, according to FT. The startup reportedly is aiming to raise $250 million in total investment and OpenAI’s ventures team is expected to supply much of the new capital.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Conspiracy
KEYWORDS: neuralink

[MarlonRando]

In the history of bad ideas, this is definitely the worst.

[Owen]

Oh you ain’t seen nothing.

Folks may not be aware of it, but Second Life still exists. It still has a large population base that is shrinking very very slowly and the door stay open because it’s marginally profitable.

An idea has been proposed to use Neurolink to transmit the memories of the human at the keyboard to its Avatar in SL and have that stored within the enormous SL database. When the human logs off, the Avatar might switch to an AI driven mode making use of all of the stored memories and continue activities in SL while the human is moving around in its First or Real Life.

Then when the human logs in again, there can be a bi-directional transfer of memories of what has been going on inside RL and SL.

SL was always called a virtual world. This is a pretty big step towards that depending entirely on just what Neurolink can do.

[SmokingJoe]

Because Grok is now better than ChatGPT?

[SmokingJoe]

Because Grok is doing so well?

Grok is the #2 app in productivity within iOS in the following countries
US 🇺🇸
UK 🇬🇧
Ireland 🇮🇪
France 🇫🇷
Canada 🇨🇦
Ukraine 🇺🇦

https://x.com/teslaownersSV/status/1955435270104551519?t=Fndk8qD0K6kY4SPp6bDe4w&s=19

[Openurmind]

These tech giants are absolutely insane...

[dfwgator]

This is just like the Internet boom of the 90s.

The bust is coming.

[TheDon]

Excellent!

[Openurmind]

I hope so... This is all about as sensible as the Tide Pod challenge...