Somebody built an AI model using living human brain cells

A Swiss company called FinalSpark has devised a way to use living human brain tissue to train AI models. Yes, I actually typed that. 

This is disturbing on many levels, but let me start by saying, if you’re going to create a company that harvests human brain cells, calling it FinalSpark is perhaps a bit too on the nose.

‘Look, that’s Grandpa’s final spark in that jar over there.’

Why would anyone do this?

Well, aside from the sheer ghoulish fun of it, BPUs (Brain Processing Units) [1] are about 100,000 times more energy efficient than CPUs or GPUs, while also providing a delicious and nutritious snack food for zombies. 

And because training the large language models that power ChatGPT and its AI cousins consume staggering amounts of electricity and water, throwing a few energy-efficient brain cells at them makes a weird kind of sense.

The ‘BPUs’ in this scenario consist of four ‘organoids,’ or clusters containing thousands of human neurons, suspended in vitro inside “a living sphere.” Each half-millimeter-wide organoid is attached to eight electrodes that connect them to a conventional, silicon-based computer network. 

Scientists train the organoids by flooding them with dopamine (good organoid!) or electric current (bad organoid!), which causes them to create new neural pathways, similar to how regular old non-human neural networks operate. [2] This also makes them crave Doritos Smoky Chile Queso corn chips, which is what happens to me when I’m flooded with dopamine and electricity.

Here’s what these disembodied brain cells look like on the job:

You can even watch a livestream of them calculating…. something…. here. [3] Or maybe just thinking about those Smoky Doritos. It’s really hard to tell the difference.

Brain in vain?

Where do these living brain cells come from? You might reasonably ask. I am certainly wondering that myself. You’d assume such information would be prominently featured on the FinalSpark website. You would be wrong.

I suggest looking around and see if anyone you know appears to be missing a few brain cells. If so, it is most likely them. If you cannot find anyone whose organoids seem a little limp, it is probably you. [4]

FinalSpark is hardly the only company hoping to make billions in the burgeoning field of biocomputing – using DNA, molecules, cells, and other bits of living tissue to perform calculations – but it’s the only one I’m aware of that has tried to turn the cerebral cortex into an Airbnb. 

So far, the only folks to rent the FinalSpark Neuroplatform for a weekend getaway are researchers at roughly three dozen universities, who are using it to test whether these dollops of grey matter can scale to the size required to do something besides creep the rest of us out.  

Final thoughts

There are a few barriers to overcome before FinalSpark can start mass-producing AI brains. Per Live Science: 

Sticking points remain for organoid computing's ability to compete with silicon on a large scale. For one thing, no standardized manufacturing system exists. And living brains die: FinalSpark's organoids only survive for an average of around 100 days (and that's considerable progress from the original experiment's lifespan, which was just a few hours). But Jordan notes that Neuroplatform has "streamlined" its in-house process for making organoids, and its facility currently houses between 2,000 and 3,000 of them.

Considering that the average human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons (fewer when covered by a red hat), we remain a significant distance from any Terminator-ish ‘Hasta la vista, Humanity’ moment.

Of course, the Internet was started by a bunch of nerds in lab coats trying to get 300-baud modems to talk to each other over copper wiring. Look how that turned out.

Whose brainy bits would you like to see powering a computer? Nominate your candidates in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] BPU is not an actual term, though I am thinking of trademarking it.

[2] Of course, the original neural networks were designed to mimic the structure of the human brain – hence ‘neural’. What goes around comes around, I guess. 

[3] Personally, all I see from this livestream are a bunch of caterpillars crawling across a straight edge. Maybe it was my brain organoids they harvested.

[4] The actual answer is the organoids are grown from stem cells…. or so they claim.