Miniature Disembodied Brains

From Jeremy Kahn's 3-30-20 Fortune Magazine article entitled "A Startup Is Building Computer Chips Using Human Neurons":


One of the most promising approaches to artificial intelligence is to try to mimic how the human brain works in software.

But now an Australian startup has gone a step further. It’s actually building miniature disembodied brains, using real, biological neurons embedded on a specialized computer chip.

Cortical Labs, based in Melbourne, is hoping to teach these hybrid mini-brains to perform many of the same tasks that software-based artificial intelligence can, but at a fraction of the energy consumption. Currently, the company is working to get its mini-brains—which so far are approaching the processing power of a dragonfly brain—to play the old Atari arcade game Pong, Hon Weng Chong, the company’s cofounder and chief executive officer, said.

The benchmark is significant because Pong was among the early Atari games that DeepMind—the London-based A.I. company known for its work with artificial neural networks, software that in some ways mimics the functioning of human neurons—first used to demonstrate the performance of its A.I. algorithms in 2013. That demonstration helped lead to Google’s purchase of DeepMind the following year.

Cortical Labs uses two methods to create its hardware: It either extracts mouse neurons from embryos or it uses a technique in which human skin cells are transformed back into stem cells and then induced to grow into human neurons, Chong said.

These neurons are then embedded in a nourishing liquid medium on top of a specialized metal-oxide chip containing a grid of 22,000 tiny electrodes that enable programmers to provide electrical inputs to the neurons and also sense their outputs.

Right now, Cortical Labs is using mouse neurons for its Pong research.

“What we are trying to do is show we can shape the behavior of these neurons,” Chong said [...]

It is not the only company working on biological computing. A startup called Koniku, based in San Rafael, Calif., has developed a 64-neuron silicon chip, built using mouse neurons, that can sense certain chemicals. The company wants to use the chips in drones that it will sell to militaries and law enforcement for detecting explosives.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have taken a different approach—using a specialized strain of bacteria in a hybrid chip to compute and store information.

To read the entire article, click HERE.