🧠 Wired: Mini-brains learn to play Pong and Doom
Wired published an overview of organoid intelligence (OI): mini-brains ~5 mm in size, containing up to 5 million neurons, are placed on microchips and trained with electrical impulses. Cortical Labs demonstrated playing Pong and Doom, while FinalSpark (Switzerland) demonstrated reading Braille. Energy consumption reduction — up to 10 billion times vs GPU. NIH allocated $87 million to the field.
🌍 OI is a parallel computing track alongside silicon AI. It does not compete with LLMs, but could change data center energy. Cortical Labs and FinalSpark are already commercializing biocomputers.
👤 Organoids do not possess consciousness — but they demonstrate short-term memory and learning. The boundary between biological tissue and a computer is blurring.
Source 1: https://www.wired.com/story/organoids-lab-grown-brains-neural-networks/
Source 2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-024-00200-6