SILICON VALLEY — By Joseph Martinez, AI Bee Reel Staff

January 16, 2026

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Productivity hit a standstill at the Merge Labs headquarters today after management confiscated all physical input devices. In the silent open-plan office, 50 employees sat motionless at empty desks, veins popping on their foreheads, as they strained to ‘think’ a quarterly update email into existence.

“We are strictly bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability,” said VP of Neural Synergy Brad Johnson, tapping his temple. “Typing is for the weak. OpenAI led our $250 million seed round to eliminate the latency of fingers. If you can’t mentally transmit a pivot table to the cloud by lunch, you clearly don’t want it enough.”

The transition has faced minor hurdles. “It is mostly going great,” explained HR Director Sarah Lee, wiping a small nosebleed with a tissue. “Although, Gary in Accounting got hungry during the budget meeting and accidentally projected a high-definition image of a ham sandwich onto the server. We are adjusting the sensitivity settings to filter out intrusive thoughts about snacks.”

At press time, the company removed all computer monitors, requiring staff to simply hallucinate their work directly onto their retinas.

Inspired by the real story: OpenAI invested heavily in a startup building brain-computer interfaces to help humans merge with AI. Read the full story.