News Human brain organoid bioprocessors now available to rent for $500 per month

[Admin]

FinalSpark, the firm behind Neuroplatform, has begun to offer paid 24-7 remote access to its bioprocessors. Academic customers can now access this biocomputing platform, featuring four shared organoids, for $500 per user per month.

Human brain organoid bioprocessors now available to rent for $500 per month : Read more

 

[vanadiel007]

For some reason Dr. Evil comes to mind: 1 million.

 

[usertests]

What if it goes on strike?

 

[gg83]

Very interesting.

 

[Elf_Boy]

I question how using human brain tissue is ethical?

How long does it survive?

If they keep making bigger organoids when do they start to think?

No doubt there are answers to some/all of these questions. I am interested in seeing them.

 

[bluvg]

Here's your chance to play with the Star Trek Voyager computer's precursor.

 

[bit_user]

FinalSpark hopes that adopting bioprocessors based on biological neurons rather than transistors could significantly impact the incredible energy expenditure we often hear about in the tech world. Saving billions of watts when training LLMs or other intensive tasks should also be a positive for the environment.

I think these are for research and not a substitute for digital artificial neural networks. AFAIK, there's no way to read out the weights from one organoid or program them into another. That's a key capability computers offer that biology simply lacks. It takes like 10k GPU hours to train a huge LLM, but then you can replicate it and deploy it for inferencing very cheaply.

Also, you surely know how hard it is to learn even a fraction of what some of these popular LLMs know. And that's using your whole human brain. There's no way an organoid is going to learn data on the scale of what LLMs deal with.

Finally... oh I must've forgotten!
: D

 

[bit_user]

What if it goes on strike?

Or maybe your training drives it insane?

...but seriously, I'm sure it needs to sleep, right? Sleep is a biological requirement of real neurons. I'm pretty sure everything with a brain or central nervous system sleeps - even insects.

 

[usertests]

Also, you surely know how hard it is to learn even a fraction of what some of these popular LLMs know. And that's using your whole human brain. There's no way an organoid is going to learn data on the scale of what LLMs deal with.

I think we'll end up seeing brain-computer hybrid technology to get the best of both worlds, IF literal biology is going to play any significant role at all in future computing/AI. Organoids could also be run in parallel with fast interconnects.

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computing can also be a lot more efficient than AI-focused GPUs. But it won't die if you don't give it nutrients on schedule.

We haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible, because unlike organoids, we don't have massively multi-layered monolithic 3D chips, neuromorphic or otherwise (if the neuron-like elements use infrequent spikes like neurons, that lowers power consumption and heat, which is one of the biggest issues with 3D).

I question how using human brain tissue is ethical?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_organoid

Brain organoids are permitted in part because they are small and simple, avoiding the ethics issues. You have to wonder if connecting them in parallel or some other tricks could increase their capabilities.

I've heard 1 year for survival but they may have extended that.

 

[bit_user]

I think we'll end up seeing brain-computer hybrid technology to get the best of both worlds, IF literal biology is going to play any significant role at all in future computing/AI. Organoids could also be run in parallel with fast interconnects.

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computing can also be a lot more efficient than AI-focused GPUs. But it won't die if you don't give it nutrients on schedule.

You're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is how to read out & program the weights. Unless/until you solve that, I see these organoids being useful only for a limited range of research projects.

We haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible, because unlike organoids, we don't have massively multi-layered monolithic 3D chips, neuromorphic or otherwise (if the neuron-like elements use infrequent spikes like neurons, that lowers power consumption and heat, which is one of the biggest issues with 3D).

I have no idea why you think the physical structure of chips needs to match that of a 3D brain. Computer memory is effectively 1-dimensional (it all gets mapped into a linear address range), but we can use it to represent & process N-dimensional data.

Sure, if you have a distributed memory or processing-in-memory architecture, then you can derive better power-efficiency by employing chip-stacking, but it's really just a power-saving technique. Any network topology can be processed as a graph, which you can map to a linear or planar array of processors.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

I question how using human brain tissue is ethical?

How long does it survive?

If they keep making bigger organoids when do they start to think?

No doubt there are answers to some/all of these questions. I am interested in seeing them.

Either this is an elaborate hoax or this is an ethical scandal of epic proportions. The fact that this has played out many times in movies as a trope and nobody is raising ethical concerns in these articles leads me to believe the former is true, but get me off this world if it's the latter.

 

[bit_user]

Either this is an elaborate hoax or this is an ethical scandal of epic proportions. The fact that this has played out many times in movies as a trope and nobody is raising ethical concerns in these articles leads me to believe the former, but get me off this world if it's the latter.

Before you freak out, always do a sanity-check.

They said these organoids are up to 100k neurons. A normal, adult human brain has about 86 Billion neurons. That's about a million times the size of these things! Even a humble mouse brain has about 70 M neurons, or about a thousand times the size of these.

So, no ethical concerns, IMO. These things aren't going to be doing any sort of high-level cognition or have any kind of self-awareness. It's not going to run a LLM and you're not going to have a conversation with it.

 

[usertests]

I have no idea why you think the physical structure of chips needs to match that of a 3D brain. Computer memory is effectively 1-dimensional (it all gets mapped into a linear address range), but we can use it to represent & process N-dimensional data.

Ask an organoid, it will tell you why.