News World's first bioprocessor uses 16 human brain organoids for ‘a million times less power’ consumption than a digital chip

[Admin]

A Swiss biocomputing startup has launched an online platform that provides remote access to 16 human brain organoids. FinalSpark’s Neuroplatform is claimed to be the world’s first online platform delivering access to biological neurons in vitro.

World's first bioprocessor uses 16 human brain organoids for ‘a million times less power’ consumption than a digital chip : Read more

 

[frogr]

But can it run Crysis

 

[ezst036]

Would it be configured either in x86 or ARM compatibility?

FinalSpark says its Neuroplatform is capable of learning and processing information, and due to its low power consumption could reduce the environmental impacts of computing

Yeah, right. Being biological, what is the requirement around refrigeration? How much power does that use?

Data centers also consume far far less power when you omit the cost of their refrigeration needs as well.

 

[vijosef]

Transistors can also use orders of magnitude less power, but at lower speeds. Organoids cannot do billions of calculations per second.

 

[CmdrShepard]

Matrix was a warning, not an instruction manual damn it.

 

[bit_user]

I'm sure this is a breakthrough for people doing brain research or work on prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces. For other applications, I'm skeptical.

I mean, let's say you can train it to do some tasks comparable to how deep learning is being used. Okay, what then? You can't scale up inferencing, by replicating the trained network. And after its couple month lifespan is up, you have to start over and train up a new one. Plus, do you have to give it time to rest? Does it forget things over time?

I really think the article is taking this somewhat out of context.

 

[bit_user]

Transistors can also use orders of magnitude less power, but at lower speeds. Organoids cannot do billions of calculations per second.

If you model the computational processes being performed by brains and nervous systems, they are indeed quite a bit more efficient than digital computers running at any speed. Obviously, if what you need is to perform highly accurate & precise computations, neural networks of any kind are a poor tool for the job.

Matrix was a warning, not an instruction manual damn it.

Though I thoroughly enjoyed the original movie, it was written by people with a poor grasp on science. In their vision, the machines were using humans as a biological power source and the point of The Matrix was basically to keep us from dying of boredom... or something like that. For such a cool movie, you'd think they could've done a little more work on the premise, but times were different and most movies made very little effort to getting the basics of science & technology right. Anyway, I somehow managed to watch the movie without even picking up on that detail, so it didn't ruin it for me.

 

[usertests]

I'm sure this is a breakthrough for people doing brain research or work on prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces. For other applications, I'm skeptical.

I mean, let's say you can train it to do some tasks comparable to how deep learning is being used. Okay, what then? You can't scale up inferencing, by replicating the trained network. And after its couple month lifespan is up, you have to start over and train up a new one. Plus, do you have to give it time to rest? Does it forget things over time?

I think this startup is an attempt to scale up and productize something that has been around for over 20 years now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrot

If you model the computational processes being performed by brains and nervous systems, they are indeed quite a bit more efficient than digital computers running at any speed. Obviously, if what you need is to perform highly accurate & precise computations, neural networks of any kind are a poor tool for the job.

Brain organoid chips are already a brain-computer interface. I say connect it to a digital computer/coprocessor that does the hard calculations, if that's needed for the application.

It could be similar to what people want brain implants to be (beyond helping quadriplegics): you think of a math problem or look at a complex problem on a whiteboard, it's solved instantly and the answer is reported back to you. It's also like the subdivision of labor we see in SoCs. CPU, GPU, NPU (matrix math accelerator). Why not add quantum and neuromorphic coprocessors?

As for how useful this type of living/dying coprocessor could be, it could become a shortcut to strong AI. You can understand how a brain works in order to replicate its functions in silicon, or you can bypass understanding and grow a highly connected brain in a vat. These organoids are tiny and simple compared to a human brain, but it may be possible to eventually scale it up to create an interconnected system that's larger and more powerful than the brain of any animal that has ever existed. Or likely to exist due to biological limitations.

 

[TerryLaze]

Would it be configured either in x86 or ARM compatibility?



Yeah, right. Being biological, what is the requirement around refrigeration? How much power does that use?

Data centers also consume far far less power when you omit the cost of their refrigeration needs as well.

These will be more like quantum computers in what they will be used for and can actually process. Completely different from x86 and or arm.
And I can see them using a million times less power than a similar quantum computer.

Also how do you keep your head in freezing conditions to keep your brain cells working?! Why would they use refrigeration? Brain, and all types of cells, work slower the cooler they are. Maybe they will have a bunch of cells prepared and in storage in case the ones they use wear out or whatever but that's not gonna be more expensive than your freezer at home.

and the point of The Matrix was basically to keep us from dying of boredom... or something like that. For such a cool movie, you'd think they could've done a little more work on the premise,

The machines had to keep the human brains from figuring out that there was anything wrong because that lead into the human bodies rejecting the implants resulting in the loss of entire crops.

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. "

"The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."

 

[Silas Sanchez]

Why not add quantum and neuromorphic coprocessors?

As for how useful this type of living/dying coprocessor could be, it could become a shortcut to strong AI. You can understand how a brain works in order to replicate its functions in silicon, or you can bypass understanding and grow a highly connected brain in a vat. These organoids are tiny and simple compared to a human brain, but it may be possible to eventually scale it up to create an interconnected system that's larger and more powerful than the brain of any animal that has ever existed. Or likely to exist due to biological limitations.

The problem of quantum computers is the same old problem i already knew about back in high school, in order to deal with the problem of decoherence you need a huge amount of engineering and power consumption. They keep telling us about error correction but that just adds to the complexity/energy requirements becoming a disaster. perhaps limited to big firms and gov, but the nature of QC is such that its a lousy tool for general computing and is more suited for solving specfic problems.

Strong AI is really two things, its original specific definition had to do with the problem of how meaning/understanding could possibly arise from manipulating symbols (syntax), the argument being that there was no conceivable way this could happen. It was eventually directed towards the computational theory of mind-that human reasoning is at its core the processing and manipulating of symbols. But the definition was a gross simplification as its very narrow.
At its extreme-whether a machine could truly have a mind, is so far from pure speculation. There is really no consensus on whether the idea is sound or not-given the huge variety of ways to go about it and our severe lack of understanding on our own mind, whether there are other forms of a mind-even within ourselves or other objects/systems. Remember, consciousnesses is a huge mystery that science most likely wont ever solve, how something as apparently lifeless as flesh and chemical & electrical signals give rise to something so vivid and hard to define. I never did buy the whole 'neaurocorreltaes of consciousness' fantasy. Strong AI is part of the problem of other minds & the hard problem of consciousnesses applied to machines. It's completley 100% safe from ever being probed.

The idea that all we have to do is make a computer powerful and complex enough and it will have a mind like ours or even similar is one of the fatal intuitions entricnhed in society. You put a face on an andriod, and wow! Perhaps now we should consider if its possible that it has a mind.

They say AI researchers are not concerned about strong AI, just that it works.
But there would have to no doubt be ethical issues, even with this awful thing we can "AI", its already doing massive damage to society.
Its often said the best chance of a digital computer having a mind is simply by simulating the human brain, neuron for neuron and have sensory inputs to it so it grows up and learns in the world. But again, ethics...

 

[cyrusfox]

Though I thoroughly enjoyed the original movie, it was written by people with a poor grasp on science. In their vision, the machines were using humans as a biological power source and the point of The Matrix was basically to keep us from dying of boredom... or something like that. For such a cool movie, you'd think they could've done a little more work on the premise, but times were different and most movies made very little effort to getting the basics of science & technology right. Anyway, I somehow managed to watch the movie without even picking up on that detail, so it didn't ruin it for me.

In the original script the humans were actually used for computation, they change it to a power source in the movie(think to simplify it for audiences), but the original script was closer to your original point, that being we are actually very efficient "Machines" [Reddit link saying as much, simpler post to the point)

 

[Maltrer]

Voyager had this tech, then the ship's computer caught a virus.

 

[TerryLaze]

they change it to a power source in the movie(think to simplify it for audiences)

Or because it doesn't make any sense, I mean how do you keep a brain conscious while using it for computation without the consciousness realizing it?!
It would fire synapses in the whole brain, wouldn't that be basically like having seizures/epilepsy 24/7?
And even if they would figure that part out they would lose a big amount of computational power by letting the people have consciousness, and their body for that matter would lower the efficiency by a whole bunch, they would just have the heads/brains somewhere kept alive without a conscience just doing compute all the time.

The machines needing the heat from the full body makes a lot more sense as to why the machines would keep the humans as complete bodies, the conscious part makes less sense but probably it's more efficient than life support.

 

[bit_user]

I think this startup is an attempt to scale up and productize something that has been around for over 20 years now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrot

They don't say anything about robotics. Being based in the cloud, latency would seem to high & unreliable for many of the more interesting robotics applications.

I really think it's just a research tool.

Brain organoid chips are already a brain-computer interface.

Sure, at the most basic level. However, there's probably still a lot left to be discovered in that domain. For instance, I've heard prosthetics are only just beginning to gain the capability of providing sensory feedback. I'm not sure that's a totally solved problem.

It could be like how something like PCIe has an electrical specification, but then there's a signalling layer atop that. Then, you have a protocol layer, followed by an application layer. Maybe, with human-brain interfaces, we're still in the process of cracking the protocol layer.

I say connect it to a digital computer/coprocessor that does the hard calculations, if that's needed for the application.

It could be similar to what people want brain implants to be (beyond helping quadriplegics): you think of a math problem or look at a complex problem on a whiteboard, it's solved instantly and the answer is reported back to you. It's also like the subdivision of labor we see in SoCs. CPU, GPU, NPU (matrix math accelerator). Why not add quantum and neuromorphic coprocessors?

I can understand how a brain-computer interface would let you solve math problems at the speed of thought, but you'd still have to make a conscious effort to think the entire expression. That would save you the trouble of typing it into a calculator, but we're still talking about only a couple floating point ops/sec.

If you want to be able to just look at a math problem on a whiteboard and know the answer, that would probably require an implant in your optic nerve that can decode what it's seeing and respond to various commands and queries about it.

As for how useful this type of living/dying coprocessor could be, it could become a shortcut to strong AI.

Not really. Those organoids are far too small to do anything resembling general AI. Otherwise, it wouldn't be ethical (or legal) to use them like this.

 

[bit_user]

The machines had to keep the human brains from figuring out that there was anything wrong because that lead into the human bodies rejecting the implants resulting in the loss of entire crops.

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. "

"The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."

Credit for looking that up, but the reason I didn't even bother to go there was the laughable science of the main premise - that humans would be used as a power source.

If you happen to be around vegetarians, for a while, you'll likely come across arguments for their diet based on the amount of energy (and water) it takes to raise animal protein. Even in optimized "factory farms", something like chicken is still a much less energy-efficient form of protein than just eating vegetable protein.

Let's not get side-tracked, here. The point is that living organisms consume quite a bit of energy, are pretty useless for turning it into electricity. If you did want a bioreactor for doing that, you'd almost certainly start with a vat of micro-organisms and maybe splice in some electric eel genes or something. No reason to have fully-intact animals, much less humans.

The machines needing the heat from the full body makes a lot more sense as to why the machines would keep the humans as complete bodies,

It still fundamentally doesn't make sense, though.

The best rationale I can see for something like The Matrix is as a giant ant farm that the machines use to study human society, behavior, and culture. Also, maybe as a source of entertainment. If viewed in the larger context of studying humans, perhaps you can make a case for preserving the whole body so that the machines can take people out of The Matrix and do other experiments on them.

Anyway, it's just sci fi. Fun, but still make believe.

 

[bit_user]

The idea that all we have to do is make a computer powerful and complex enough and it will have a mind like ours or even similar is one of the fatal intuitions entricnhed in society.

You raise a lot of interesting points, but I will seize only on this one. Before long, society will be forced to come to terms with the dilemma of how close mimicry has to be, before it should be considered the real thing. If an AI can be built that fits every behavioral definition of general AI, how can we say it's not truly intelligent?

Maybe you're right and AI will never be that good, but I have yet to hear a truly compelling argument that it can't. I've seen people point to limitations of LLMs, but those are far from the only approach being developed in the AI field. To me, it sounds like so much hubris to say AI can never be intelligent in the way humans are.

 

[vijosef]

Or because it doesn't make any sense, I mean how do you keep a brain conscious while using it for computation without the consciousness realizing it?!

Your brain does it 24/7.

You aren't conscious of the computations needed for your body to breath, to drive a car, to use your fingers.

When you sleep, your brain makes an entire virtual reality for you, and part of the sleep time you aren't conscious at all, but your brain is working at full steam.

 

[bit_user]

Your brain does it 24/7.

Yeah, the subconscious is indeed quite powerful, but also somewhat limited in the sorts of tasks it can undertake.

You aren't conscious of the computations needed for your body to breath, to drive a car, to use your fingers.

The autonomic nervous system is also somewhat limited in the functions it can perform.

When you sleep, your brain makes an entire virtual reality for you, and part of the sleep time you aren't conscious at all, but your brain is working at full steam.

That's different. You indeed are aware of some of what your brain is doing, but we have a tendency to quickly forget our dreams. If you have a very specific cognitive task to perform, sleep is of very limited value in completing it. Furthermore, sleep is when the brain undertakes most of its routine maintenance. You can't harness the brain for normal cognitive loads while it's sleeping. I think we all know these things, but I think this is a fundamental limitation of sleep.

 

[AkroZ]

As previously stated I remember an article from a science review twenty years ago were a french reseacher interfaced rats brain cell with electrods and it was able to fly in Microsoft Flight Simulator without crashing with some hours of practice. This was also the lifespan of the cells.
The true challenge is to maintain the cells alive, and to do that the best way is to keep all the body : very good to make very smart boss in games or other applications and cheap, if you don't have animal protection associations breaking down on you.

 

[bit_user]

As previously stated I remember an article from a science review twenty years ago were a french reseacher interfaced rats brain cell with electrods and it was able to fly in Microsoft Flight Simulator without crashing with some hours of practice. This was also the lifespan of the cells.

It must've had some feedback other than visual, because you'd need most of an intact rat brain to have any chance of visually parsing the rendered images to fly the sim.

 

[Dementoss]

Data centers also consume far far less power when you omit the cost of their refrigeration needs as well.

A rather pointless comment, given data centres cannot operate without their cooling...

 

[J Gravelle]

AI is a good idea.

AI that has to eat might not be a good idea...

 

[ezst036]

Also how do you keep your head in freezing conditions to keep your brain cells working?!

Without refrigeration, these things might be called: Heart. Blood circulation. Various organs which cleanse food and water as it is consumed. Other organs which produce chemicals (hormones) that keep other systems functioning properly. A nervous system to sense when there is damage.

None of which is cheap, BTW.

Why would they use refrigeration? Brain, and all types of cells, work slower the cooler they are. Maybe they will have a bunch of cells prepared and in storage in case the ones they use wear out or whatever but that's not gonna be more expensive than your freezer at home.

I'd like to know their costs for a whole-body circulation system then that they are using to keep rot from setting in.

Either way they have to have something. Biological cells don't stay put in a vacuum.

 

[ezst036]

A rather pointless comment, given data centres cannot operate without their cooling...

It is absolutely with a point. Processing data in data centres does not exist on its own. Processing data biologically is not going to exist on its own either. Look at the provided picture:

What's that big box there attached to the wall behind the monitor on the left? Is that a clean-room type environment? What kind of chemicals are required for upkeep? Is it a refrigerated zone? Is it like a chip fab in that box? They're wearing white coats, is their whole department a kept similar to a clean-room?

How much does it cost for the chemicals, or for refrigeration, and how much does it cost to scale? Scaling up is the issue here. Keeping one PC cool is not nearly as costly as a whole data center, so keeping in mind the minor refrigeration or chemical or etc costs that come with the kind of clean-room environment that you see in this image here, even at a small scale doesn't look like it is free.

The larger the ramped up scale, the more expensive it becomes.

 

[FredJordan]

I am one of the co-founder of this startup, and I will be happy to give some insights.

I think this startup is an attempt to scale up and productize something that has been around for over 20 years now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrot

Indeed, Steve Potter was absolutely visionary with his work and is actually now one of our advisors. However, as @bit_user mentionned, we are not targetting any robotic application at the moment.

As for how useful this type of living/dying coprocessor could be, it could become a shortcut to strong AI. You can understand how a brain works in order to replicate its functions in silicon, or you can bypass understanding and grow a highly connected brain in a vat. These organoids are tiny and simple compared to a human brain, but it may be possible to eventually scale it up to create an interconnected system that's larger and more powerful than the brain of any animal that has ever existed. Or likely to exist due to biological limitations.

I fully agree to this.

These will be more like quantum computers in what they will be used for and can actually process. Completely different from x86 and or arm.
And I can see them using a million times less power than a similar quantum computer.

Indeed, when one to look at it is if we consider that our brain consumes the equivalent of 20W while a digital simulation of 100 billion neurons will be several order of magnitude higher. Some projections give 1'000'000 times more energy efficiency for biological systems.
Now, we feel that we are a bit like quantum computers 20 years ago, but believe we will have much faster progresses: after all, we are using a proven technology

Also how do you keep your head in freezing conditions to keep your brain cells working?! Why would they use refrigeration? Brain, and all types of cells, work slower the cooler they are. Maybe they will have a bunch of cells prepared and in storage in case the ones they use wear out or whatever but that's not gonna be more expensive than your freezer at home.

Actually the organoids are kept at 37C, we have thousands of them stored like this, waiting to go on the electrodes.

As previously stated I remember an article from a science review twenty years ago were a french reseacher interfaced rats brain cell with electrods and it was able to fly in Microsoft Flight Simulator without crashing with some hours of practice. This was also the lifespan of the cells.
The true challenge is to maintain the cells alive, and to do that the best way is to keep all the body : very good to make very smart boss in games or other applications and cheap, if you don't have animal protection associations breaking down on you.

At the beginning we indeed had a lifespan of a few hours... currently we have about 3 months.