BRAINS OF THE OPERATION

Biological computers pair the best of human & artificial intelligence

- DAMIEN MARTIN

The human brain is an incredible thing. We aren't the fastest or strongest creatures on Earth, but we rose to the top of the food chain because we're the smartest. We created tools to give us an advantage over the faster or stronger animals.

We created computers that can solve problems our brains would take hours to tackle. Where computers outdo humans is in processing simple information. A computer can multiply two very large numbers faster than we can because there are simple rules for the calculation.

When it comes to making decisions based on complex information, there's no beating the human brain.

So, what if we combined the power of a computer with the power of a human brain? What if we could fuse human brain cells with computer hardware? What might we be able to do then? We're about to find out.

A Biological Computer

In 2022, Australia’s Cortical Labs put 800,000 human and mouse neurons on a computer chip and trained the new network, called DishBrain, to play the classic video game Pong. Playing a simple, 50-year-old game that plenty of computers have mastered isn’t the most towering achievement, but it displayed promise of what could be.

Three years later, Cortical Labs has unveiled CL1, the world’s first commercialized biological computer. The CL1 combines real, living human brain cells with silicon hardware to create neural networks that learn faster than any LLM.