While generative AI is in vogue right now, what OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are doing may only be part of the story. There’s also the process of using biology: the idea of using stem cells to create biocomputers that could potentially be smarter and more energy efficient than what we’re used to today.
Australian startup Cortical Laboratories came on the radar after Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recently flew to Australia to visit their lab, and he even wrote about it, calling it “fascinating”.
Cortical combines synthetic biology and human neurons to develop a class of AI known as ‘Organoid Intelligence (OI)’.
It has now raised a $10 million round of funding led by Horizons Ventures, with participation from LifeX (Life Extension) Ventures (whose launch we covered last year), Blackbird Ventures, Radar Ventures and In-Q-Tel (the corporate branch of the CIA).
The company says it is already fulfilling orders for its technology.
How it works is that it uses clusters of lab-grown neurons from human stem cells to form what it calls a “DishBrain,” which then plugs into hard silicon to create what it describes as a Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS ).
Some observers say this is the future of AI because human neurons could outperform any digital AI model for generalized intelligence given that they program themselves and require much less energy.
Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs said in a statement, “The possibilities that a hybridized model of AI and synthetic biology can unlock are limitless, accelerating the capabilities of digital AI in a more powerful and sustainable way.”
Jonathan Tam of Horizons Ventures said, “Being able to use these systems to better understand and ultimately exploit how neurons display intelligence will ultimately open up a plethora of applications, including a revolution in personalized medicine and disease detection.”
Cortical Labs’ technology first appeared in October 2022 in the scientific journal Neuron and showed that neurons in a petri dish can be encouraged to play the computer game Pong.
This sounds trivial, but as Weng Chong told me via email, this could enable the development and testing of new drugs and therapies, plus “if you took your blood and turned it into neurons, this drug discovery would become even more personalized – the results would be tailored just for you.
He also says the competition in the space is low: “It doesn’t directly compete with anything because this is the first of its kind to pioneer Organoid Intelligence. Organoid Intelligence has the potential to learn faster and use far less energy than any other AI system in existence. GPT is so smart because it’s taken over all the internet, but you or I don’t have to do that to have pretty good conversational skills.”
“It has taken at least 10 years since Geoff Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky put in a GPU to do Deep Learning that we got to where we are today. We are still in the early days of this technology,” he added.
In the short term, he says, an immediate application is to effectively drop a new drug onto the cells to test it — when the cells can no longer play Pong, you know the drug isn’t working: “Not only is the efficacy able to be better defined, but also the cognitive side effects (brain fog) can be elucidated as we now have a potential assay for cognition in the form of neurons playing the Pong game.”
He says the technology could also be used to study dementia and even to ‘brute force’ test the connections we’ve discovered using Quantum Computing and Generative AI.”
And possibly further into the future “if the number and complexity of these neurons are scaled, the end result would be familiar to us as fully embodied organisms such as a cat, dog or human.”
Hold on to your hats, folks.
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