ChatGPT Creator Sam Altman’s Weirdest Side Projects, Ranked

Altman is also an investor in Neuralink, the notorious Elon Musk founded research startup that is trying to create a human brain-computer interface. During a C round of funding in the summer of 2021, Altman ponied up a significant chunk travel of change to the creepy company’s ongoing mission. Neuralink’s operation hasn’t been without the occasional hiccup—the biggest of which is the fact that its test subjects—a crew of unfortunate Macaque monkeys—keep dying. Indeed, last February, the company confirmed reports that at least six monkeys had died as a result of the its experiments, many of which involved surgeries to install brain implants in the animal’s heads. The company was also hit with a public records lawsuit by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a non-profit that lobbies against animal testing, which alleged that Neuralink had given some of the monkeys a substance that killed them “by destroying portions of their brains.”
Weirdly enough, the rash of monkey deaths associated with Neuralink hasn’t stopped the FDA from recently approving the company for future trials of its bizarre Matrix-like technology on humans. I guess the federal government’s view is that if you kill a few animals on your way to creating the dystopian headset of the future…ehhhh, fuck it, that’s a small price to pay. Go figure. Score: Altman investment involving the most monkey deaths.