The company aims to raise $250 million from OpenAI and other investors, although the talks are at an early stage. Altman will not personally invest.<\/p>\n
The new venture would be in direct competition with Neuralink, founded by Musk in 2016, which seeks to wire brains directly to computers.<\/p>\n
Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI, but Musk left the board in 2018 after clashing with Altman, and the two have since become fierce rivals in their pursuit of AI.<\/p>\n
Musk launched his own AI start-up, xAI, in 2023 and has been attempting to block OpenAI\u2019s conversion from a nonprofit in the courts. Musk donated much of the initial capital to get OpenAI off the ground.<\/p>\n
Neuralink is one of a pack of so-called brain-computer interface companies, while a number of start-ups, such as Precision Neuroscience and Synchron, have also emerged on the scene.<\/p>\n
Neuralink earlier this year raised $650 million at a $9 billion valuation, and it is backed by investors including Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, and Vy Capital. Altman had previously invested in Neuralink.<\/p>\n
Brain implants are a decades-old technology, but recent leaps forward in AI and in the electronic components used to collect brain signals have offered the prospect that they can become more practically useful.<\/p>\n
Altman has backed a number of other companies in markets adjacent to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which is valued at $300 billion. In addition to cofounding World, he has also invested in the nuclear fission group Oklo and nuclear fusion project Helion.<\/p>\n
OpenAI declined to comment.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2025 The Financial Times Ltd<\/a>. All rights reserved<\/a>. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The company aims to raise $250 million from OpenAI and other investors, although the talks are at an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-65288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}