Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting for one thing – the power to control our thoughts

Since falling out with each other, the two tech egos have clashed constantly, and now they’ve turned that rivalry into harnessing our very own brainwaves. The results could be terrifying, says Chris Stokel-Walker

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, the owner of X formerly Twitter, used to be close to one another. The two operated in the same Silicon Valley social circles, and even came together to found a company. But their dispute has since turned sour, and – given their interest in new brain-harnessing technology – it could affect us all.

The enmity between Altman and Musk dates back a decade, to their co-founding of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab now best known for being behind ChatGPT, at an academic conference in 2015. The founding principle of OpenAI was to develop artificial intelligence in a way that could benefit humanity – something that Musk believes the company went back on, hence his departure in 2018. In the years since, and particularly since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, Musk has looked on with suspicion.

As ChatGPT became more popular, Musk felt the need to compete. He launched xAI the following July with the stated intention “to understand the true nature of the universe”. Then, in February this year, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it had strayed from its original non-profit mission and had been “transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company: Microsoft”.

Since then, the two tech egos have clashed constantly, including earlier this month, when the pair battled over claims of bias and manipulation by Apple in relation to their respective AI platforms. Musk claimed that Apple was giving preferential treatment to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the App Store, allegedly making it impossible for any other AI company – including his own xAI and its chatbot Grok – to reach the top of the App Store rankings.

It was a claim that was quickly proved false, including by Musk’s own Grok chatbot fact-checker. Altman hit back, alleging that Musk manipulates the algorithms and features of X in order to benefit his companies. Among all the arguments were a fair few personal shots, too.

Now the competition has moved beyond AI, to BCI – brain-computer interface technology. This involves implanting a chip in the brain that then uses tiny threads to interpret brain signals and control external devices. People in the US who are paralysed and have been fitted with such chips have been able to control computer cursors, play video games, and edit YouTube videos solely with their thoughts.

It’s an exciting new world, but it’s harnessing a longstanding technology. “Reading brain waves has been done for a long time with EEG [machines] in a medical setting, wiring people up to a machine and then measuring that,” says Allan Ponniah, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and CEO of Cogitat, a company developing the technology that can decode brain signals. “But the problem was always that the signal was very noisy, and to get a clear signal usually takes several hours, with an individual having to identify which signal pertains to what.”

To counter that, a more invasive technology was needed. However, this more invasive route, which is the type proposed by Neuralink, a BCI company founded by Musk in 2016, is seen as being more complicated to implement and having a longer lead time for bringing products to the market.

Last month, Neuralink sought to register patients in Great Britain who were willing to volunteer to have devices implanted. While Ponniah insists that the notion is “quite far into the future in terms of how far away it is from reality”, Neuralink has gone from strength to strength in under a decade, and is currently valued at $9bn (£6.7bn), after raising $650m in June.

Sam Altman is reportedly poised to back a Neuralink competitor called Merge Labs (Getty)

But Neuralink could soon have competition. OpenAI’s Altman is reportedly poised to back a Neuralink competitor called Merge Labs, which could also receive up to $250m of funding from OpenAI and other investors. It would be a significant shift for Altman, who has previously invested in Neuralink.

The two billionaires investing their time, effort and money into BCI tech is good news, says Ponniah. “There's a huge gap [between hope and reality], and that huge gap can’t even be investigated without a huge investment.”

Even so, Ponniah believes it’s unlikely to come to fruition in the way the tech titans want. To go beyond the noble goal of bringing a paraplegic patient some control over their body, which Neuralink has already done in part, would require more mainstream use – turning people into bionic men and women.

“It would have to be able to pull a robot arm or control something like that, or control an exoskeleton,” says Ponniah. “It would have to get to that level, and I don’t think we’re anywhere near that.”

So why are Musk and Altman stumping up the cash regardless? “Musk wants to go to Mars as well,” says Ponniah, pointing to other apparently outlandish goals.

Elon Musk pictured in the White House in May this year (AFP/Getty)

But for Catherine Flick, a professor of digital ethics at the University of Staffordshire, there’s more at stake than simply “can it be done”. “It’s one of the next spaces this whole hype machine, hype-industrial complex can head towards,” she says.

Flick points out that the current crop of large language-model-powered AI tools are not making the sort of massive gain that would justify the cash being ploughed into them. “They’ve got to keep investors throwing money at them, and shareholders thinking that they’re worth something,” she explains. “So they need to pivot. And I think this is one of the spaces they’re pivoting into.”

She also thinks that a sense of wanting control is behind the move towards BCI. “It’s the next step for this weird kind of cult-like religious experience that these men are having, where they feel like they’re the saviours,” she says. “They’re the prophets of where humanity is going to be, and they want to use technology, they want to steer the technology, and they want to be in control of that.”

In the future, adherents of BCI imagine it could push beyond its current medical applications, where it helps restore function to people who are paralysed, and that it could find its way into mainstream consumer products and reshape daily life. In practical terms, this could mean controlling everyday devices such as smartphones, computers, and even vehicles, purely by thought.

Musk has been taking aim at ChatGPT since its launch in 2022 (AP)

Of course, that comes with potential downsides: if brain signals can be tracked, some users may worry that their inner neuroses could be, too. Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI division, has warned of the risks of “AI psychosis” as people become addicted to interacting with AI chatbots. BCI could, in theory, take this a step further. That’s if you can afford it, of course – and if the tech ever leaves the medical labs, it’s likely to be costly, and could split society between those who can afford it and those who can’t.

Yet beyond that, there is also the personal prodding and probing that has typified the interactions between Altman and Musk. “I think he just likes to poke Elon,” says Flick. “I think that Sam maybe is trying to hasten his downfall in some ways by putting some competition into the space so that it’s more obvious how badly this is going.”

The fear Flick has is that the primary motive is not necessarily to develop BCI technology in a way that benefits everyone who might need it, or even the average, everyday user. If one party in the BCI race is pursuing it in a bid to spite a longstanding enemy, that doesn’t bode well for the future development of the technology.

“There’s a lot of white-billionaire class superiority built into it,” says Flick. “It's very much dividing the haves from the have-nots.”