Thanks to ChatGPT and other systems, artificial intelligence is a major topic. A company has presented a special project: they are connecting real brain cells with a computer. They plan to present advancements in San Francisco now.
Artificial intelligence is now used in many areas, but the foundation is often graphics cards or servers that are responsible for the calculations. One company wants to take “artificial intelligence” to a whole new level by combining human cells with a chip.
Human brain cells are said to already be able to play successfully
What kind of company is this? Cortical Labs is an Australian startup. The company grows human brain cells in the lab and wants to combine them with computer chips. A few months ago, the company based in Melbourne received a hefty financial boost for its cultivated brain cells (via forbes.com).
What exactly is the company researching? The company itself wants to market biological computer chips, which it refers to as “DishBrain”: these are human brain cells derived from stem cells and grown on microelectrode arrays. Cortical Labs claims it is capable of performing targeted tasks.
Last year, Cortical Labs stated that its biological computer chips have already been shown to work and successfully learned how to play Pong from Atari:
Cortical Labs connected DishBrain to a computer that then sent electrical signals to the cells, which indicated where the bouncing ball was located and how far away it was from the paddle. DishBrain made its own decisions about how to move and learned to improve its performance through feedback from the electrical signals.
What comes next? On Twitter, Robert Scoble, a well-known author of science books, posted a short video of the computer with brain cells. Further insights are to be presented at the Brain Conference
in San Francisco:
The computer looks more like an elongated bowl where the cells have been integrated into the chip. The model therefore bears little resemblance to the appearance of a real brain, like the brain companion from Baldur’s Gate 3, which adorns our title image.
A similar experiment with brain cells has now also been presented by other researchers: Researchers from the University of Illinois have used tens of thousands of living brain cells from mice to build a computer that can recognize light and electrical patterns:
Researchers create living computer from mice – Sounds like from a dark science fiction movie
