Organic-silicon hybrid computer tech for sale

From Jack Clark:

Cortical Labs puts the CL1 on sale - a computer that combines neural tissue with a silicon chip:

…BRAIN IN A COMPUTER! BRAIN IN A COMPUTER! BRAIN IN A COMPUTER!...

Ever read announcements where you have to squint and work out if it's an April Fools joke? I do. Many years ago I was convinced that the announcement for 'Soylent' was a kind of high-art scam, but it turned out to be real. Similarly, you might think brain-AI startup Cortical Labs is a joke given what it's trying to do. But I assure you: it's real.

What's it doing? It's releasing a computer that is a combination of a brain and a computer chip, called the CL 1: "Real neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying them with everything they need to be healthy. They grow across a silicon chip, which sends and receives electrical impulses into the neural structure," the company says in a blog post.

What CL1 is: CL1 comes with an onboard 'Biological Intelligence Operating System' (biOS). The bios is a software interface into the neurons. Users of CL 1 can, via the biOS, "deploy code directly to the real neurons", the authors write. "The CL1 is the first biological computer enabling medical and research labs to test how real neurons process information – offering an ethically superior alternative to animal testing while delivering more relevant human data and insights."

Each CL1 can keep neurons alive "for up to 6 months".

To get a sense of how you might use it, you could read this paper where they show how you can train biological neural nets to outperform deep reinforcement learning algorithms on some basic gameworlds: Biological Neurons vs Deep Reinforcement Learning: Sample efficiency in a simulated game-world (OpenReview).

Why this matters - more substrates for future machines: While the CL1 may hold some interesting uses for human scientists in the short term, I actually think the 'long play' here is that the CL1 is exactly the kind of thing a superintelligent synthetic scientist might need if it was trying to figure out the mysteries of the human brain - so perhaps one of the first mass market buyers of Cortical Labs' work will be a cutout corporation operated by a synthetic mind? I am genuinely not joking. I think this could happen by 2030.

Read more: Introducing the CL1 The world’s first code deployable biological computer (Cortical Labs, blog).

The link takes you to the website for Cortical Labs where you can purchase their tech, buty also has links to papers about it.

Clark's sorta' right about this:

I actually think the 'long play' here is that the CL1 is exactly the kind of thing a superintelligent synthetic scientist might need if it was trying to figure out the mysteries of the human brain...

Not only that, but as a substrate for a new generation of learning-based AI tech, one that's not restricted by its orginal training run. The biological neurons can keep on learning. This technology can only get better.