World's first bioprocessor uses 16 human brain organoids for ‘a million times less power’ consumption than a digital chip
World's first bioprocessor uses 16 human brain organoids for ‘a million times less power’ consumption than a digital chip
Swiss startup claims its Neuroplatform is a first for biocomputing.
So we’re starting to get to the point where its theoretically possible for computers to get real organic viruses? “Sorry boss I cant work today my computer caught Covid and coughed on me so now I have it too :(”
There was a documentary about this awhile ago which was pretty terrifying. They basically go into how you can essentially "grow" computers to augment reality and human perception. Pretty crazy. "eXistenz" was the name I think. I believe Jude Law was the narrator or something, I don't remember.
I'm positive that David Cronenberg had no idea what a video game was when he made that movie
Weird. I just very recently tried hard to remember the name of this movie, for a completely different topic (teeth as ammo).
Great movie. DEATH TO EXISTENZ!
Very good movie
Way back in limewire era this was credited to NiN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW_4mRJCatg -- to this day i havent got to the bottom of it. I should watch the movie
Get the cheese to sickbay!
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Are homeless people going to start mysteriously disappearing now
Don't need the homeless. You can pluck a hair, donate your blood, or even take a plug of your foreskin if you have one, to generate the neural stem cells from iPSC, the cell type they use in this process.
Nah. No way. I don’t want my computer asking me for vodka...
IIRC these organoids also die after somewhere around 100 days of hypoxia, because they have yet to be able to construct a proper circulatory system for them.
Oh, a CPU that straight up expires? A product that comes with enshittification built in from the start? Corporations' mouths are watering as we speak.
It's not a product yet in part because it dies in 100 days.
That would be a much older thing, planned obsolescence
So basically a first trimester abortion. Will these be available in Texas?
Is this legit? This is the first time I've heard of human neurons used for such a purpose. Kind of surprised that's legal. Instinctively, I feel like a "human brain organoid" is close enough to a human that you cannot wave away the potential for consciousness so easily. At what point does something like this deserve human rights?
I notice that the paper is published in Frontiers, the same journal that let the notorious AI-generated giant-rat-testicles image get published. They are not highly regarded in general.
They don't really go into the size of the organoid, but it's extremely doubtful that it's large and complex enough to get anywhere close to consciousness.
There's also no guarantee that a lump of brain tissue could ever achieve consciousness, especially if the architecture is drastically different from an actual brain.
Believe it or not, I studied this in school. There's some niche applications for alternative computers like this. My favorite is the way you can use DNA to solve the traveling salesman problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing?wprov=sfla1)
There have been other "bioprocessors" before this one, some of which have used neurons for simple image detection, e.g https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o. But this seems to be the first commercial application. Yes, it'll use less energy, but the applications will probably be equally as niche. Artificial neural networks can do most of the important parts (like "learn" and "rememeber") and are less finicky to work with.
Careful. Get too deep into that and people will have to admit lesser animals have forms of consciousness.
Seems like it's an ethical gray area. Some brain organoid have responded to light stimulus and there are concerns they might be able to feel pain or develop consciousness. (Full disclosure, I had no idea what an organoid even was before reading this and then did some quick follow up reading)
I'm concerned about what kind of hardware is sold on tomshardware
Tom's, of course
If you wanted Pete's, shoulda went to peteshardware 🤷
Turns out the origin of borgs was actually earth!
"LOBOTOMITE!"
I have very good raisins for everything that I do
Organoids is such a fun word to say.
The Return of The Organoids
I also like to play around with it.
People seeing scifi works as somehow prophetic is something I will never understand..
Prophetic? Fuck no. Cautionary tales that unfortunately turn into self-fulfilling prophecies? That's a different story
Scifi is kind of reverse prophetic, a lot of people become scientists because they were into scifi and at the end of the day we need to imagine something is possible before we can invent it.
Article claims they are human brain organoids, doesn't say where the source of them is. Are these grown, like most other neural computing systems, or are they actually taking matter from a human brain?
Here’s a video that starts with a good general overview of brain organoids:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=x1Pg56WWm5U
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
pffft good luck getting my brain organoids to do your bidding... I am deeply tarded
Nice, two more and it'll make a fine president
Some cells get taken from you and turned into stem cells.
These are converted into brain cells, and nerve cells, on a chip that represents the scaffolding, interface, and connectivity.
Then the whole 'organ-device' gets surgically installed into your brain, and through gene therapy, the brain cells grow into, connect with and network into your existing tissue.
They have to use STEM cells because other kinds of cells are bad at math.
Boo this man!
And then every time you sneeze, you end up ordering another case of diapers from Amazon.
It could be penis cells for all we know.
You misspelled 'should.'
Nanotechnology, finally my penis will be heralded as a hero!
They could be guiding bombs with this technology and it would be immune to Electromagnetic attacks.
Begun, the Bone Wars have.
Stop giving them ideas.
Why am I remembering that video with Ukrainian (I think) soldiers arming a custom-made bomb (for a copter) with schrapnel in the form of little dicks?
Worse at approximation but more deterministic.
And CEOs should love it since they only go up.
We're getting closer to the Imperium of Man every day.
At least we get the Golden Age of Technology first.
Just ten thousand years to go!
If this works, it's noteworthy. I don't know if similar results have been achieved before because I don't follow developments that closely, but I expect that biological computing is going to catch a lot more attention in the near-to-mid-term future. Because of the efficiency and increasingly tight constraints imposed on humans due to environmental pressure, I foresee it eventually eclipse silicon-based computing.
FinalSpark says its Neuroplatform is capable of learning and processing information
They sneak that in there as if it's just a cool little fact, but this should be the real headline. I can't believe they just left it at that. Deep learning can not be the future of AI, because it doesn't facilitate continuous learning. Active inference is a term that will probably be thrown about a lot more in the coming months and years, and as evidenced by all kinds of living things around us, wetware architectures are highly suitable for the purpose of instantiating agents doing active inference.
tbh this research has been ongoing for a while. this guy has been working on this problem for years in his homelab. it’s also known that this could be a step toward better efficiency.
this definitely doesn’t spell the end of digital electronics. at the end of the day, we’re still going to want light switches, and it’s not practical to have a butter spreading robot that can experience an existential crisis. neural networks, both organic and artificial, perform more or less the same function: given some input, predict an output and attempt to learn from that outcome. the neat part is when you pile on a trillion of them, you get a being that can adapt to scenarios it’s not familiar with efficiently.
you’ll notice they’re not advertising any experimental results with regard to prediction benchmarks. that’s because 1) this actually isn’t large scale enough to compete with state of the art ANNs, 2) the relatively low resolution (16 bit) means inputs and outputs will be simple, and 3) this is more of a SaaS product than an introduction to organic computing as a concept.
it looks like a neat API if you want to start messing with these concepts without having to build a lab.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this guy has been working on this problem for years in his homelab
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It's been in development for a while: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o
Even before the above paper, I recall efforts to connect (rat) brains to computers in the late 90s/early 2000s. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1012407611130
"brain organoid" sounds like an insult.
Statement: you are correct. They should instead be called brain meatbags.
Poor HK reading this article, must be disgusted to the core of his purely inorganic soul.
Okay, brain organoid
What's the FLOPs of this thing? Without this crucial info, we can't know if it's useless for training AIs or not. Training cost so much in terms of energy because the machines they use are beasts in terms of performance.
As if tech isn't enough of a hyper specialized mess already now we're throwing biologists into the mix. "Sorry we need to wait for the registered nurse to fix your machine I'm not authorized to administer meds through the CPU's IV"
From a read of that article, it appears that they are feeding it analog inputs, which would imply that it is producing analog outputs. I don't know if there is a way to evaluate floating point operations on an analog system. That said, my knowledge is very cursory, and someone will surely correct me.
Can it do backpropagation?
I'm confused. I assume they somehow still use electric signals? Do they still compute in binary? How does that work exactly?
Though, if this could reach a product state that's similar to silicon based processors, and the power consumption argument is true, then this could revolutionize the entire digital age.
It's a bunch of neurons that speak to a computer with a microelectrode array. So they "speak to" the neurons with electric impulses, and then "listen to" what they have to say. The computer it's connected to uses binary, but the neurons are somewhere in between. Yes, the change in electrical potential is analog, but neurons are typically in their "on" state, recovering from their "on" state, or just chilling out.
The brain is incredible because of the network of connections between neurons that store information. It'll be interesting to see if a small scale system like this can be used for anything larger scale.
