Sam Altman’s Answer to Bots

Alex Blania (CEO of Tools for Humanity, Co-Founder of World, and Co-Founder of Merge Labs) joins Sourcery to explain why the internet is heading toward a breaking point: bots, deepfakes, scams, and autonomous agents are scaling faster than trust. “99.9% of internet traffic will be AI driven.” “It’s not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause.” World is trying to build a “real human network” a proof-of-human layer for the AI era, and the numbers are getting serious: • 38,374,194 World App users across 160 countries • 17,832,402 verified unique humans • 970,885,726 wallet transactions We talk about: how proof-of-human actually works, what happens when bots outnumber people online, why identity becomes the bottleneck for markets and platforms, and what a “verified human internet” could look like. Then we go deeper into Alex’s second frontier bet: Merge Labs, a brain–computer interface research lab that raised $252M seed round at an $850M valuation, backed by Bain Capital Ventures, with OpenAI as an investor and research collaborator, plus Gabe Newell. Merge Labs is pursuing less-invasive, higher-bandwidth BCIs, exploring ultrasound-based modalities and molecular approaches to interface with more of the brain without implants. The bot era is here. The question is: how do you prove you’re human online, and what happens when you can’t? Alex Blania: ⁠https://x.com/alexblania⁠ Molly O’Shea: ⁠⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠⁠ Sourcery:⁠⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc⁠ 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/7PnaQzw_K8E⁠ 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! ⁠https://www.sourcery.vc/⁠ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Alex Blania (01:27) World Explained: ID, Chain, App — The Full Stack (04:47) World Card, Stablecoins & Encrypted World Chat (08:22) 37M Users, 17M Verified — And It’s Still Not Enough (11:02) “Fail-Safe Privacy” — Why This Can’t Break (12:18) Where Proof of Human Actually Wins: Social, Dating, Gaming (14:04) Stop Fighting Bots — Label AI vs Human (16:49) How Alex Met Sam Altman (22:25) Operating with Sam While Building Two Companies (24:39) Inside Merge Labs — Why It Took 18 Months (24:58) “Last Innings Before Superintelligence” (32:38) Launching Merge Labs – $252M Seed Round (34:01) OpenAI Funding (37:30) Brain–Computer Interfaces 101 — Why Bandwidth Matters (42:14) Mind Control? Privacy? The Real BCI Misconceptions

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  I think we have some big news today. Can you please address the rumors?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Which one?

• 0:05Molly O'Shea?

  You don't know which one?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  No, I don't know which one.

• 0:07Molly O'Shea?

  What happened?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  What happened? Well, I think we're announcing

• 0:11Molly O'Shea?

  $250 million. With investment from OpenAI, how are you going to be working with them?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  It's a direct investment from OpenAI, not a venture arm. And so it is an actual collaboration. Three major areas, I think, will be biology, chips, AI systems.

• 0:26Molly O'Shea?

  Brain control.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Not brain control.

• 0:29Molly O'Shea?

  Like world, we'd like to go after controversial spaces. Biometrics has also perked some ears up. What are the biggest misconceptions?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  The biggest one is, of course, around privacy. What's so counterintuitive about what we're doing here is that we have designed a system that can be fundamentally anonymous and is fundamentally anonymous and privacy preserving. And biometrics, I think, is the only way to actually solve the problem. Platforms like X will not be usable if they don't come up with completely new technical solutions.

• 0:57Molly O'Shea?

  How are you going to combat the bots?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It's not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause. But rather, every human on these platforms will need some version of a proof of human and actually prove that their content is authentic. And then we will have all the rest. The goal of this is to create the largest real human network on the internet because we think that will actually really matter. Because I think 99.9% or something of all internet traffic will be AI-driven.

• 1:24Molly O'Shea?

  Alex Blania, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:27Molly O'Shea?

  So for people who don't know what world is, what is world? And what is the full stack that you're building?

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it is the real human network. That's how we're talking about it. So we're trying to imagine what real humans on the internet will need. And so it starts with a proof of human. And so that's, these are actually the devices that do that. But the simple, simple problem statement is that, as I mentioned before,

• 1:58Speaker 01

  AI has has to train tasks. And it can, can look like a human. It can talk like a human on the internet. And so we will need a proof of human for every place that we interact with other people. And that turns out to be a quite challenging problem. Like, it needs to be privacy preserving. It needs to be able to work in every country. So there's like, there's like many things around that that we had to solve. And, you know, I think we came up with probably Current technology, one of the best, the best ways to do that. So that's, that's part one. And then we always had this idea that like, once we have proof of human, we can use that to boot serve a financial network on top of that. And so we're working a lot on how to make kind of the crypto stack useful to everyday people.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And so now we actually, we have the largest wallet in the world in terms of users. And we have a lot of people that use it every day. And so that's, that's super exciting. So you have World ID, you have World Chain, which is the blockchain that everything is running on top of. And we have World App that makes all of that useful for people. And World ID specifically, I think you will see integrated with many of the large platforms that you're already using today in the coming months, maybe, if we're good. And yeah.

• 3:16Molly O'Shea?

  So like Merge, or I guess like World and Merge, you'd like to go after somewhat of controversial spaces? And so Biometrics has also perked some ears up. What are the biggest misconceptions that you're constantly facing?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the biggest one is of course around privacy. And I think what's so counterintuitive about what we're doing here is that we have designed a system that can be fundamentally anonymous and is fundamentally anonymous and privacy preserving. And Biometrics, I think, is the only way to actually solve the problem. And I would need to go much deeper into why it is, but I think it is the only way to solve the proof of human problem on the internet. But the cool thing is with cryptography and, and you know, all the advancements that happened there over the last couple of years, you can build it fully anonymous and privacy preserving. But I think that's like by far the biggest misconception. But there's like other things around like, do we do, do we collect data? And is that our business model? And that's basically just all wrong.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Like we, the business model is, you know, we, we think that this is a network. And so it has very strong network effects. And so we are very confident that if this keeps growing and keeps scaling, and many platforms start integrating it, this will be very, very valuable. And you know, we will be able to charge fees on the network and things like that. But it's not the data of users, obviously. So that's another big misconception.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably talk to you.

• 4:46Molly O'Shea?

  So we're just coming off unwrapped and you have released some new features and products to the world with World. Can you share some of those highlights? What are you most excited about?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Sure. So it was like very World App focused. So, you know, just taking a step back. The goal of this is to create the largest real human network on the internet because we think that that will actually really matter. Meaning with the current AI progress and with everything that is happening, having some sense of real human interaction in every sense, like financially, socially, etc. will turn out to be like a really, really big deal. Much more than it seems today because I think like 99.9% or something of all internet traffic will be AI driven. And so that's, you know, the high level.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  But we are working on World App, which is, you know, so we're working on this network and we'll talk more about that. But World App is our client for the network that we're building. And we're just like trying to showcase how this network will be useful. So the network is a decentralized protocol that we are working on and we're trying to share with the world. World App is actually our product, our Tools for Humanity, we're currently Tools for Humanity company, office. And that's our product that we're working on. And what we released, many new financial features. So, you know, paying with World Card, many new stablecoin integrations.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Like basically in all the countries that we are operating with a lot of users. We have now 40 million users around the world. And so we're trying to support different countries, different currencies. That was a big one.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  We released World Chat, which is actually bringing all those things together. So it's a kind of a chat within World App. And we have been super obsessed about the cryptography and the privacy side of that. So it's extremely private, but it also allows you to use all the other features of the network. So the financial side, soon there will come world ID features. So you can, you can use deep face, what we call that. So you can actually verify profile pictures of each other and, you know, and much more. So these were two of the big ones. We actually showcased the Tinder integration, which was really funny, at least on stage.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  So, meaning like within Tinder and right now in Tinder Japan, it's already live. You can prove both that you are in fact a real human. You will be able to prove that these are authentic profile pictures that you're using. And you can prove your age. So all things that like really, really matter to make this an authentic dating experience. And you will see much more of that. So you will see like many big platforms integrating many of these different primitives that we're talking about. Somehow every week right now feels like Christmas, like there's like so much cool stuff. And I'm really, really excited about the company and I think the team is crushing it.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  But I think the really, really cool stuff will come in Q1 and we're already working on that. So I'm always one step oriented in the future. So the event was awesome. I think the team crushed it. I think the product was super cool, but you know, some sense tomorrow is even cooler.

• 8:22Molly O'Shea?

  You've also hit some really big growth numbers. Do you want to share some of those?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, always, there's always two sides to that. Where like on the one hand, we did, on the other side, we picked much bigger ones and you know, we were aiming much higher. So we're now, I think 37 million users total, 17 million of which are verified. So they used one of these orbs.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And yeah, there was like a lot of growth this year for that purpose, but.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  The mission is to really get to everyone. And so, everything below hundreds of millions is not, doesn't mean much to us in some sense.

• 9:01Molly O'Shea?

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• 9:46Molly O'Shea?

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• 10:31Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I remember highlights from the presentation were hitting 16% APY on up to $1,000 in your account. That's insane.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  It is. Yeah, people go nuts over that.

• 10:45Molly O'Shea?

  2 billion mini-app users?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:48Molly O'Shea?

  That's pretty crazy.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Uses, not users.

• 10:51Molly O'Shea?

  Uses.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:52Molly O'Shea?

  Uses.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Big difference.

• 10:53Molly O'Shea?

  2 billion users would be a lot.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, then I would be happy.

• 10:57Molly O'Shea?

  Soon.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, soon. That's right, Mini Apps was a big one.

• 11:02Molly O'Shea?

  And then the chat encryption I thought was really cool. I was talking to Shane Mack after and he was telling me about the rigorous integration process that he had to go through in order to make sure that the chat was encrypted and will be encrypted for 10 plus years so no one's leaking any information. And he had to prove solving Shor's algorithm or something crazy like that.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:23Molly O'Shea?

  Is this a typical process you put everyone through? Test their quantum skills?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Well, so we have like, one of our core, so we have values and we have operating principles and one of the operating principles is fail-safe privacy. Because in some, like, that's the only way you could kill this company in a second. Like, if like, one engineer is doing something stupid and we would leak user privacy, basically in any form or shape, that would be so harmful to the project. And so like, we are obsessed about privacy. And, yeah, and that's, and we have a very, very technical team. We have like, many cryptographers that, you know, are excited to be here.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  So we are, I think we are like, on the very far extreme end on that dimension.

• 12:17Molly O'Shea?

  Between all that, what are the verticals you're most excited about for proof of human?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  So I think like, just generally speaking, my mental model of this is that I think AI passed a Turing test, meaning it, you know, it can, it can talk to us on the internet, cannot generate videos, it can do everything that we can do and it probably can soon do it much better than we can do it. And so what that I think means is that truly every place on the internet where humans are currently interacting with each other will start to break without such a technology. And, you know, not just interactions will break, but as a result, all the platforms that are built on human interaction will break. And so. First of all, it's quite bullish on the road.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  But second, I think the initial use cases that I think like make the most sense for us are obviously social networks.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Dating is a big one. Gaming is probably going to be a big one. And just like other ones that you don't immediately think of. And it's kind of a secondary effect, but like, for example, ticketing. Things like Ticketmasters and things like that. There's like a lot of artists that are angry about the fact that there's like bots buying all these tickets.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So but that's roughly how I think about it. And so I'm trying to spend time on each of these verticals and try to find the biggest integrations. And also try to understand what are the, you know, what are the things about our product that need to change to make it kind of more useful to them. And so that's like a big, big time spent from my side now.

• 14:05Molly O'Shea?

  It's pretty crazy how fast the bots accrue. Like, I remember when Elon first got into Twitter, now X, and he reduced all the bots. It like really lowered the amount of traffic on the platform and everything. And then all of a sudden, it is completely picked back up. I have bots following my account all the time. I'm sure there's bots all over Reddit. And then that will affect like model research and all that kind of stuff because it's all fake. Yeah, how do you, how are you going to combat the bots?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  So, good question. I think, first of all, what I think the future will look like is much more of a, we will need to be able to distinguish what is a human and what is an AI. But I actually think we will probably want to have a lot of bots on our social platforms. We just need to know that these are in fact bots. But like, once you really have, you know, super, super smart AIs and some of them like have

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Whatever, I fine tune in different ways and talk about different things that I think that's actually gonna be quite fun and quite cool and we will like that. But we will need to know that. Am I currently talking to an AI system that is like trying to change my political view? Or am I talking to a to a to a human that is maybe also in San Francisco? And and so like me investing the time talking about San Francisco city policy is actually time well spent.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  So that that's kind of much more of how I think about the future is like that. I think it's not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause. But rather, every human on these platforms will need some version of a proof of human and and actually prove that their content is authentic. And then we will have all the rest on the platforms. So there's that. And then to your point, I think like we're just brought like we are at the bare beginning of how all of this is gonna look like. Just because, once you have true agentic systems and once you have these very kind of capable agentic systems also be open source.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Things will go like quite exponential. So I think we are still very, very early on the overall shape of how it will look like. So I think my personal prediction, I might I might I might be wrong with this, but I think platforms like X will not be usable in like a matter of months, maximum two years.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  If they don't come up with completely new technical solutions. I think what we're doing is very useful for that. Maybe there's other ideas that we we are missing. But at least currently, I think it's the best idea that there is.

• 16:49Molly O'Shea?

  I think a big question a lot of people would love to hear and love to hear about is how you and Sam originally met? And then how it evolved to world and then now to merge?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  We originally met through a, you know, a long set of random events, I think.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  So, you know, I grew up in Germany. And, you know, I did a lot of things there. You know, I did these science competitions and stuff like that. Started a vertical farming company back then. And but but nothing, nothing like really kind of big or something that actually. But but then I went into into into science. So I studied industrial engineering and physics and then quantum physics, theoretical physics and quantum theoretical physics.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  I got quite lucky because kind of next to my university, there was a Max Planck Institute. And that just recently opened. Max Planck is in Germany is like one of the, you know, one of the best research institutions. And the director for theoretical physics at the institute started working on deep learning and how you can apply deep learning to all kinds of physical questions, but mostly quantum quantum systems. Quantum systems are, you know, very, very hard to calculate, especially if they're at scale. And there's so many interesting questions that come with that. So I started working on that topic. And then I went to Caltech in Los Angeles and continued my research there.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And in parallel, actually, I I applied to Y C one twenty, which was this conference that Sam hosted, I think, just once. And the idea was hundred of the smartest students in the world would meet twenty top industry people or something like that. And you had to record a one minute video, application video. I did that. I got declined and I was like super angry at that. And so I I actually wanted to fly there and tell them that. But I, you know, they were quite diligent about not sharing the address to protect against people like myself, I assume.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  I was never in the U S before, nor ever Silicon Valley. Although I actually like, I always wanted to come here.

• 19:10Molly O'Shea?

  Why? How did you get exposed to it growing up in Germany?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  So I have this like whole story about how I think how important that is and how people in Silicon Valley always underestimate how important it is that Silicon Valley has those. Centralizing force on talent, but I think the main thing I can remember is while I was like super young, for the purpose of that discussion, eleven, twelve, maybe even slightly younger than that, there was an article, it was the title page of Der Spiegel, which is like the, one of the largest German newspapers, and it was talking about Silicon Valley. And I was like,

• 19:56Speaker 01

  you know, I was obsessed with technology. I was like reading all these like technology books. My dad was the opposite of that. My dad was like an economist, and he always made technology sound like, you know, not that serious, and you should do more serious things. But in that story, they were talking about this idea that there's Silicon Valley, and there's all these people, all these technologists, they come together, and they work on things they think will change the future. Well, the story itself was actually very cynical. I was too young to really realize that. But Der Spiegel is like a little bit anti-tech. So it was like, the underlying tone of the story was just making fun of Silicon Valley, and like how funny it is that all these people think that they're like, they can actually change the world with

• 20:38Speaker 01

  tech. But I read this, and I was like, this is awesome. I want to go there. And so basically, since, from that time on, I knew I would go to Silicon Valley one day. Told my parents, told my friends, everyone made fun of it, but it was kind of clear.

• 20:52Molly O'Shea?

  And then through YC and everything, you got exposed to Sam, you began working.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and then, yeah, right. And then like in high school, I watched all these YC videos, and the interviews from Vnode, and all that stuff. So I was on Twitter, and all these kinds of things. And then actually, what happened is, I met Sam Oboria, who you might know, a really cool guy. And he was at YC 120. I think Samo and Max, who was the other co-founder of World back then, were connected, and somehow that's how it came up. And so then I got an email from Max and Sam about Rollcoin, it's like a two pager that both of them wrote. So like, both of them already were working on the project

• 21:38Speaker 01

  for like six or seven months. And yeah, then I had many interviews with Max, and then I met Sam for an interview, and we kind of. Hit it off. It was actually, it was like a multi-month process and I, you know, the idea didn't make much sense to me initially and so locked myself in the Caltech library book then, tried to make sense of it. Still didn't make much sense. So it was like many ups and downs. Almost declined the offer. I kind of already did and then, but somehow we, we figured it out. And then, and I think, you know, now Sam and I have worked together for, what is it, six years. Just become better and better friends and now I think we're pretty

• 22:21Speaker 01

  close friends and try to work on many things together.

• 22:25Molly O'Shea?

  And how do you both manage, for him, OpenAI, you for World, well, I guess for him, OpenAI and World and all the other projects he's working on. And then for you, World, and then coming into Merge. How do you think you're going to lead these two companies?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  So, the first question about World and how we work together on that is I think we have a pretty good cadence of, we usually try to do it once a week. Sometimes it doesn't work, but I try to send Sam a kind of an in-depth update about anything that has happened in a week. And it's usually, you know, it depends on how much time we have in the company, but it's, it's sometimes like very in-depth. It's like 10 pages, you know, all the major slides that have happened within the week. And we just talk through everything. And then,

• 23:14Speaker 01

  my, you know, simple internal rule and the cool thing is actually that like Sam would probably would have been fine either way, but my simple rule is always like every major decision that I make, Sam should be involved in. So that is about like recruiting, strategy decisions, big spending decisions, et cetera. He has been super generous with his time on pretty much every important call that we had to do around fundraising or partnerships, integrations, all these kinds of things. So that's kind of how we're working is.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Trying to keep him up to date on the company operation like once a week and then get him involved in all the big strategic decisions and work streams, which could be financing, partnerships, hiring decisions, mostly. And then for Merge, honestly, I don't know yet. I started waking up much earlier.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  And like, you know.

• 24:07Molly O'Shea?

  How's your sleep?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  I kind of said goodbye to my social and personal life completely. I never really had it, honestly, since the start of world. But like now it's gotten so extreme that I basically don't respond messages anymore. And it's just like 14 hours a day, seven days a week, all the time.

• 24:27Molly O'Shea?

  Rebecca said you're not going to make time for yourself until we reach singularity. I don't know the exact quote, but maybe you know.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's like, that's the most. So first, to respond to the Merge question first, like, first of all, like, I'm not, I'm not running Merge in that sense. I'm not the CEO of Merge, but rather, we are, we are a group of co-founders. So it's currently, it's really structured like a research lab. It took us, I think, like, almost one and a half years to form the company. So we really spent a lot of time together. And so that's really working. But back to my, to the singularity question. You know, like, this is like very, I just, if you take a step back, the current moment in time is so crazy to me. It's just like this fact that we are probably in the last innings before superintelligence.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  That means that if you're actually, if you are an individual that can make a meaningful impact on how that's going or like, you know, of course, the pessimistic take is you cannot make any impact on anything. It's just like, this is just set on rails and superintelligence is going to happen and, and whatever happens after, who knows? You know, but that's, that's at least another decision I made for myself and for my life. I think this is like such a.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Like infinitely leveraged moment in time where any contribution you can make might make actually, might make a meaningful impact. It might not at all, but it totally might. And looking back a couple hundred years, we've never had that. Like, you know, there was like, humans thought about these kinds of problems, usually within a lifetime, basically, nothing happened. Like, you maybe had like, one scientific idea across the entire lifetime of a human, and much more so, like, literally, nothing happened. Just, you know, you were just doing, working on the field, and, you know, and, like, right now, it's just a very different moment in time. It's where, every day, something new happens,

• 26:24Speaker 01

  every new, every week, there's a new big breakthrough, and I think that will continue. And so, like, for me personally, I just make the decision that, right now, is not the time to, um, yeah, spend much of my social life for all those things. And I think, I'm just gonna go completely hardcore for the coming years, at least five or so. Um, I might regret that, but so far, it feels good. It's painful, but it just feels important.

• 26:53Molly O'Shea?

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• 27:34Molly O'Shea?

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• 27:48Molly O'Shea?

  A lot of, um, so I asked a couple people about you, and in preparation of this.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:55Molly O'Shea?

  As I usually do. But it's nothing too scary. Um, to describe you, there's two words.

• 28:02Molly O'Shea?

  People say that you're very loyal and you're very futuristic. And that you also are driven by like a really hardcore set of values.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:12Molly O'Shea?

  So, do you think that's accurate? And then what are your values?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that's broadly accurate. I mean, futuristic is an interesting one because I think, uh, we will see if I'm right. Uh, I try to think a lot about the future, obviously, but I think many, many people take it like that. I think the interesting question is, are you correct with your predictions? Which is the hard part. And who knows, like, I'm, I'm way too young to know that. But, um, I'm loyal to very few people, or like the bar is very high. I think if I have a close friendship, I'm, I'm very, very loyal. And I also just usually, usually don't give them up. So like, I'm quite restrictive on my social circle. And so it's very hard to get in there, I guess.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  But, but I'm, you know, I think that's how friendships should be. They should be deep and meaningful and they should last many years. And, and so, yeah, I would, I would probably say that's true. Like, my, my childhood was not always the easiest. And in that sense that I, you know, I was bullied and all these, these kinds of things. But I think the thing that I discovered for myself when I was around fifteen, sixteen, is that I could always get forward with discipline. And with like, being perfectly truthful.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  And so like, uh, you know, a, a big, big thing happened back then where like, my best friend died. Who, um, you know, was like, perfect person you could think of, honestly. Uh, super honest, smart. And, and that, that inspired me. And so, and so like, you know, from, from that time on, I, I have this, this long note, which is probably at this point.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  It's probably a hundred pages about all the things that I believe in and kind of what are the core values and the principles that I try to live by. And so, so I'm probably erring way further on that than normal people do.

• 30:19Molly O'Shea?

  Can you keep on deciding to go after harder and harder things?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:23Molly O'Shea?

  Why do you think it's important to try to go after hard things?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  I think that's the, isn't that the purpose of life a little bit? I think it is, like, meaning going after, trying to be the best version of yourself and trying to like take on as much responsibility as you possibly can is how I would probably describe

• 30:43Speaker 01

  the purpose of life, at least how I've decided for myself. And so, yeah, you will probably keep me, like, I will keep doing that. I'll just try to do as much as I possibly can, which I think is like going in the general right direction and which I think matters for humanity.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  And I will try to push myself as hard as I can to do that.

• 31:03Molly O'Shea?

  Who are some idols or people that have mentored you along the way that you look up to? You've mentioned Sam a bunch and he's part of your life, but who are some of those people?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Couple ones come to mind, I think, like, or at least like people that really inspire me.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I will start with the people that I'm in touch with and then the people that just like broadly inspire me. But I think Ben Horowitz, I think, is incredible and just like has such a good sense and opinion about management and about like how to think about people and how to think about companies more broadly. And so I think truly incredible. We know what Kozla, you know, is like, he was one of the few people that I, you know, I was obsessed with when I was pretty young, like when I was in high school, just because he took these like very, very big bets and he was like clearly in the hard tech land, which I, which I found like super inspiring back then.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  And for, for those two, actually, that's still the case, like, meaning with both of them that I'm now in touch and I think both of them,

• 32:14Speaker 01

  I think are just like super wise and just know a lot of things, which is.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Impressive. Elon is of course like incredible. Like he has figured something out that no one else I think has yet.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  So quite inspired by that. I don't I don't know him nor uh but but but yeah. So these I think these are the obvious ones.

• 32:38Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I think we have some big news today. Can you please address the rumors?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Which one?

• 32:44Molly O'Shea?

  You don't know which one?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  No, I don't know which one.

• 32:46Molly O'Shea?

  I want to talk about Merge Labs.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:49Molly O'Shea?

  What happened?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  What happened? Well, I think we're announcing Merge Labs, which is a research lab working on bridging artificial and biological intelligence to, you know, do a lot of things that we think will be important for the future. And yeah, so the we started working on it very recently. I'm really, really excited to have found the most amazing co-founders to pull this off.

• 33:16Molly O'Shea?

  Who's involved?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  So it's kind of three camps coming together. That's kind of how it happened. It was Sam, Sandra and me. Three of us are now working together since many years on tools for humanity and on other things. Then it's Mika Shapiro, who's a professor at Caltech and has been working on BCI's for 20 years. And this, I think, like one of the most brilliant minds in that in that space. And then it's Samron Tyson, who were working on Forest Neurotech, which was a focused research organization, never working specifically in ultrasound for neural, but more broadly speaking, I think they're also just like really, really strong founders. And so.

• 34:01Molly O'Shea?

  And with this announcement comes funding. So who did you raise from?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  A large group of people, but but the biggest check was OpenAI. And then many of our friends, you know, some of the funds that have been involved here, many, many individuals, so it's like a broad, like it's a like it's a it's a large scale seed, but it is from that perspective, it is a classic seed where you try to bring in all the all the all the friends and and people along the way.

• 34:30Molly O'Shea?

  Two hundred and fifty million dollar seed?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Two hundred and fifty million dollars, yeah.

• 34:33Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, congrats.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 34:35Molly O'Shea?

  So what is the mission behind Merge? And why is now the right time to go after it?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  The mission more broadly is bridging artificial and biological intelligence to accomplish a lot of things that I think will be super important for the future. It's like, uh, agency, experience, freedom of people. And, and so it is about high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces and the relevant AI systems that we think will make such PCIs like really, really useful. And so, you know, the two big statements to make here, on the one hand, it really starts like a research lab because we think that

• 35:13Speaker 01

  to get to high bandwidth PCIs that are able to have a lot of coverage and cover large parts of the brain is at this point very much a research question. We are like, you know, we, we spent a year looking at everything and we basically left convinced that none of the current approaches will actually get us there. So that's why it's a research lab. But the long-term goal is clearly to build products that people love and want to use. And, you know, people like you and me would want to use. So kind of the broader and broader, like if you now look at a 15-year time horizon, I think it's going to be a couple of years of research, then a couple of years of medical applications and like hopefully bringing benefits

• 35:58Speaker 01

  to a lot of people that really need such a technology. And then eventually get into kind of broad consumer applications. And why is now the right time? So first of all, like there's, it's a relatively large funding team, as I quickly mentioned, just because in some sense it was like, we, we call it like three camps are coming together. Like the one camp is kind of, well, Sam, Sam and me, which is Tools for Humanity. And but just like a friend group, like we're not neuroscientists, obviously. But we were like super passionate and interested in the topic for a long time now. And so we spent some time on it.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Mikhail, who I think is like one of the leading scientists in the space and just like super incredible person. And he is a professor at Caltech and so has been working on these kinds of topics for like over 20 years. And then Sumner and Tyson from from Forrest also have been thinking about BCI for like many, many years and have built a lot of cool things. So like basically like we're coming from a diverse background, but why the time is now is like, I think on one hand, AI progress is is just not stopping and is continuing.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And so there have been, you know, some new scientific results that are very promising that Mikhail got very, very excited about.

• 37:30Molly O'Shea?

  For people who might not know what a BCI is or what BCI is, could you explain what that is?

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sure. So it's a brain-computer interface. So something that directly inputs and outputs information into your brain and connects to your neurons. So the most famous example is obviously Neuralink from Elon. And what Neuralink is doing is having this robot that is inserting these threats into your brain and they're able to do a lot of really cool things with that. So they can, you know, they can give someone that was not able to move his arms for a very long time, now able to control the cursor and use a computer again, et cetera.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  So that has been like a standard application, but and there's more ideas, you know, making blind people see again, or at least approximately, science and Max Hoda have recognized that, which I think is also super cool. So but that's the that's the general idea. The general idea is like BCI is all kinds of systems that can directly interface with the brain. And the long-term goal is that you get to much higher bandwidth than what we can do with a keyboard. Yeah, that's, I guess, that's cool.

• 38:48Molly O'Shea?

  People are saying this is going to be the next major technological advancement for computing after the smartphone. Do you think that's? Accurate.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  I'm like, you know, I'm much more bullish, actually. So first of all, I think that's that's correct. That's why we're we're kind of starting to work on this. But I'm actually also quite excited about AR and VR. So I would say that like the

• 39:14Speaker 01

  if I could do a personal guess, I think like the AR VR step will be will be next. And then I think BCI is and kind of high bandwidth BCI specifically is going to come after that. So I think it's going to be, you know, current smartphone

• 39:34Speaker 01

  situation, then you will have AR VR, and then I think you will have BCI. That will be my guess.

• 39:38Molly O'Shea?

  What is the technological differentiation for Merge compared to Neuralink and these other companies?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  A couple of things without, you know, trying to get too technical way too quickly. But for kind of the first, and I think it's a quite important statement, is we really just care about the mission. And so we have multiple approaches that we will likely pursue. So we are, you know, we have, I think, a brilliant team of many of the smartest scientists in the world working on this topic. And we have this long term mission that we go after. And, you know, I think we will get there. But

• 40:17Speaker 01

  you know, we are not

• 40:20Speaker 01

  obsessed about a particular approach or technology. But the broad scheme that we we think is is probably most promising right now with all the kind of all the results that we see right now and the current understanding we have of the space is that the combination of ultrasound and molecular sensors is probably most promising. And then you can both read and write

• 40:46Speaker 01

  in the limit with pretty much the entire brain.

• 40:49Molly O'Shea?

  Are there any applications you're excited about?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Maybe just just so you get a sense like the the current BCI is that we are dealing with. They're all on the order of a couple thousand neurons that that we can interact like with. And or, you know, actually, neurons is not even maybe precisely correct, it's channels. So meaning this is what we're talking about here, if this really works, is a completely different level of BCI. And

• 41:19Speaker 01

  We don't even have the neuroscience for that yet.

• 41:21Molly O'Shea?

  With investment from OpenAI, how are you going to be working with them? Are there any collaborations there? Is this going to be seen as like an offshoot for research? How is this implemented?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, we will find out, given like, um, it's, I think it's the first, uh, you know, this is like a first on many dimensions. And, uh, so it's a direct investment from OpenAI, not a venture arm. And so it is an actual collaboration. And, you know, as we were talking through this investment, there were like many different,

• 41:57Speaker 01

  uh, dimensions that we thought could be interesting for collaboration. But I think there's like a lot we can learn from OpenAI and how to do it best. And so, yeah, three major areas I think will be biology, chips, AI systems.

• 42:10Molly O'Shea?

  Brain control.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Not brain control.

• 42:14Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think the biggest misconceptions are about BCI? I mean, a lot of people are going to use that in headlines.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  I think it's the obvious ones. It's probably like mind control, like what you just mentioned, I think is a, is a, is a big one. All concerns on privacy, like, you know, if you actually think this through and you have a system that is actually able to access the entire brain, will we, will a company be able to know what you're thinking, et cetera? So I think that that's a big one.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  The third one is probably just because all the BCI systems that people are currently thinking of are so invasive. There's always this, this idea that BCI is, I don't know, like a quite, like maximally invasive. And you have to go through big surgery and things like that. So that's, that's another conception that I think I've sensed when I spoke to people.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  The good thing is I think all of them are very solvable. I think, uh, again, it's, it's going to be a big feat of engineering and there's going to be a lot of fundamental questions that we and others in the space will have to answer. But you know, I'm very convinced we will be able to build systems that are completely provably just the way they're set up, fully private, don't share any information with any outside service, are minimally invasive, are fully reversible, so you can just remove it if you don't want to, are upgradable, so you can get a better version if you want to. I think these are all the main things that we will have to figure out in the coming years. Once we kind of leave the research stage of that.

• 43:50Molly O'Shea?

  Alex, I have to ask, what is the most exciting thing in this office? You're legally allowed to share.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Legally is an important addition.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  I think it's probably this one. This is like,

• 44:04Speaker 01

  it's the control panel of a Soyuz space capsule. That, you know, on a Saturday night, I was like, I tried to figure out what I should put in my house.

• 44:17Molly O'Shea?

  And this is...

• 44:18Speaker 01

  This is like, and so I was like, I was looking at Sotheby's. I never, I was never bidding at a Sotheby's auction. But it was a Sotheby's space auction, so I just went rogue and I, you know, I bought like infinite amount of space stuff. And so this is one of them. And this is like the control panel. And like, this is actually quite famous for this one.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Because that's a spinning, like, that's actually how they navigated, sort of like a spinning earth. And so now why this is disassembled is our security team is like, you know, as you can imagine, they're like quite obsessed with these things. And so now we actually try to make everything functional. And so...

• 44:57Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, so it works?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  No, it's not working right now, but I think it should. Actually, over there, there's like the launch, the launch timer is on these books, on the Feynman books.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  So, but I think if you come back again in a couple of months, I think everyone is gonna, everything is gonna glow. And maybe we are able to get the thing to spin again.

• 45:16Molly O'Shea?

  It's gonna go beep boop.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it's gonna be beep boop.

• 45:20Molly O'Shea?

  And this seems like it's like, it's really informed the design of the orb. I can see so much similarity.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Good for you. Again.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Um, no, I mean, I bought it way later. I mean, the first, also, the first orb was so ugly. Look at this.

• 45:42Molly O'Shea?

  That's not ugly.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  No, the right one is very ugly. Like, the silver one, I think, is very ugly.

• 45:46Molly O'Shea?

  I like the silver.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  You do?

• 45:48Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I like shiny things.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Well, that was actually a theory, theory, where, like, people like shiny things.

• 45:55Molly O'Shea?

  And they don't?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  I think it just didn't help with the, make it seem trustworthy. It didn't help with that.

• 46:04Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, okay, yeah, you gotta make it a little bit more.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Seem too sci-fi.

• 46:07Molly O'Shea?

  Professional looking.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we toned it down.

• 46:09Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Turned it down. That's also why we have all this wood and whatever.

• 46:13Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:15Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, okay, cool. So where did this come from? You got it at Sotheby's?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  I got it at Sotheby's and came out of a truck. Originally, I don't know where it came from, like, well, obviously, it wasn't a Soviet capsule, so it comes from Soviet Russia. But I'm not sure who owned it before that. It might have been a museum. I don't know.

• 46:38Molly O'Shea?

  It's pretty cool. All right, this is legal, it's great, you have it in the office.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:42Molly O'Shea?

  And it's gonna be working next week. We'll check that in.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  It's gonna, it's gonna take, it's gonna take us a month, but we're working on it.

• 46:49Molly O'Shea?

  What are your biggest concerns for the future?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  My biggest concerns for the future? That's a deep question.

• 46:55Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  First of all, I'm actually quite optimistic.

• 47:03Molly O'Shea?

  Goodbye.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  I think it's gonna be, like, I, I, I think we can make it an incredible, amazing, exciting future, and I think that's, that's my personal default.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it would be something around AI misalignment and, like, some, something in that direction would probably be one. But that also seems to trend in a much better direction over the last couple of years.

• 47:29Molly O'Shea?

  You're too optimistic. It's too hard of a question.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  It's really, it's actually, it is quite a hard question. I mean, there's obviously a lot of potential downside scenarios, but I'm always just saying, next step is okay, we can probably solve it. We can probably fix it. So I'm just generally quite optimistic.

• 47:45Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, fair. All right. I think that's it. That's a wrap.

• 47:48Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter sorcery dot V C, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.