This article is a part of “Sources” by Alex Heath, a newsletter focusing on AI and the tech industry, and is exclusively shared with The Verge subscribers once a week.

Sam Altman is making strategic moves in the tech landscape by preparing to unveil Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup he is co-founding with Alex Blania. In a significant development, Mikhail Shapiro, an acclaimed biomolecular engineer, has been brought on board to contribute his expertise to this burgeoning venture.

While the specifics of Shapiro’s role remain under wraps, insiders reveal that he will join Merge’s founding team, playing a pivotal role in discussions with potential investors. The company is actively pursuing funding, aiming to secure substantial investments possibly amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars from sources like OpenAI, as previously noted by The Financial Times.

The recruitment of Shapiro offers a glimpse into the technological path Altman is charting for Merge. Shapiro’s engineering lab at Caltech is at the forefront of breakthroughs in biomolecular technology, particularly in non-invasive neural imaging and control methods. His research has concentrated on employing ultrasound technology to engage with the human brain, offering an alternative to the invasive procedures seen with companies like Neuralink.

Shapiro’s body of work also includes innovations in gene therapy that enable cells to be visible through ultrasound, corroborating a prior Bloomberg report suggesting Merge might utilize this approach for its debut product. Despite attempts to reach them, both Shapiro and representatives for Altman and Blania have remained unavailable for comments.

In a recent presentation, Shapiro elaborated on leveraging sound waves and magnetic fields to establish brain-computer interfaces. He explained that instead of embedding electrodes within brain tissue, introducing genes into cells to make them responsive to ultrasound could be a simpler and less invasive approach. He emphasized his commitment to developing less intrusive methods for interfacing with neurons in the brain and other bodily cells.

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.”