This from the same guys who got neurons in a petri dish to successfully play pong. The CL1 is a box with biological neurons inside that can be controlled and programmed with an API. They’ve been working on this for quite a while and just made their first public release.
Its expected the CL1 will be extremely helpful for researching Alzheimer’s and other neurological based disorders, including neuron response to medicine for faster drug testing.
Calling the OS biOS is fucking funny
They say it stays alive for 6 months, so do they send you replacement neurons? Or do you buy a new machine every 6 months?
I’ll ask them, I happen to see them in a zoom meeting occasionally.
I very very very much doubt its a new machine, however you might need to send your machine back to get it refilled as I imagine there is a precise integration between bio neurons and electrical hardware.
Holy shit! An actual programmable neuron, I see unbelievable potential on this in the future.
So, do I plug it in? Or feed it snacks?
You actually legit feed it snacks haha. There’s a nutrient mixture/sludge to keep them alive.
Just like RoboCop 😭
And if the inevitable happens, does it need to give consent?
The neurons in the machine (or at least the prototypes idk about every CL1) are neurons from the lab lead (Hans). And he has given consent 😁
Yes.
Same
This is so fucked up. Let’s stay with vegan computers!
Don’t worry all neurons are cage free, grass fed, open range
For real though, where the neurons come from is as interesting/impressive as the computation itself. The guys at Cortical, at least in prototyping, give blood samples, revert blood cells into a stem cell state, and then (over the course of 6 months) they convert their stem cells into neurons before putting them into a dish. (To be clear, Cortical did not invent the stem cell tech at all. Apparently its standard practice and nobody in the bio engineering world cared to tell the rest of the world.)
Meaning… You could theoretically build a computer out of your own neurons and then program them.
What could possibly go wrong?
They’re making head cheeses like in the Rifters books.
I wonder if the power bill would be as bad to try to mine crypto with wetware
My guess, 10,000x the cost on CL1. Even with the tech perfected, bio neurons fire much much slower than logic gates and electricity in a circuit board. If you have an ASIC (custom built board that isn’t really using a CPU), the ASIC would be much much faster for deterministic calculations at high speed with an active cooling system.
Bio neurons are great at self-organizing. If you already know how they need to be organized (e.g. a hashing algorithm), and you need max-speed output there’s no real advantage.
It’s not wrong to say bio neurons are power efficient, its just that power efficiency depends on what the activity is.
I guess that’s why in my circle of interest people are mainly using it for stuff like playing doom and controlling drone flight rather than hard number crunching
