Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Cortical Labs has launched CL1 – the world’s first commercially available computer based on neurons grown from human stem cells.
The technology is based on fusing the lab-grown cells with hard silicon. The goal is to create a new form of artificial intelligence (AI), called Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI).
SBI promises to be able to grow, adapt and learn faster than AI based on standard silicon computer chips. It also requires far less energy – a 30-unit rack of CL1 uses 850–1,000 watts of energy. By comparison, it’s estimated that training a large language model like GPT-3 uses a little less than 1,300 megawatt hours of electricity – roughly equivalent to the annual usage of 130 US homes.
CL1 was launched by the Australian start up at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) being held in Barcelona, Spain from March 3–6.
It is the culmination of 6 years of research at Cortical Labs, including the 2022 advance called “DishBrain” – a system of 800,000 brain cells which the team taught to play Pong.
DishBrain’s success in 2022 showed that the cultivated cells could be trained, through stimulus, rewards and feedback, to perform goal-oriented behaviour.
At the time, Cosmos did a deep dive into whether DishBrain represented a step toward synthetic sentience, and the ethics and science behind the cultivation of cells to produce a biological computer.
Hon Weng Chong, founder and CEO of Cortical Labs, says that the start up’s goal is to make the biological computer accessible to researchers without specialised hardware and software.
“The CL1 is the realisation of that mission,” he says. “While today’s announcement is incredibly exciting, it’s the foundation for the next stage of innovation. The real impact and the real implications will come from every researcher, academic or innovator that builds on top of it.”
The company hopes to have units and racks of CL1 manufactured and ready to ship by the end of June this year. Cortical Labs is also offering Wetware-as-a-Service (WaaS), allowing remote access to the biological computers to build applications.
CL1’s lab-cultivated cells are grown across a silicon chip that has pins used to send electrical impulses into the web of neurons and receive impulses back. This creates a high bandwidth connection between the organic network and digital set ups.
MWC will host a rack of CL1 computers. Cortical Labs and researchers from the University of Barcelona will use the rack to show how the world’s first biological computer can be used outside a lab.
“The CL1 is an incredible tool to grow our neurons in a fully controlled environment, allowing us to monitor and modify their electrophysiological features,” says leader of the MWC-based research Sandra Acosta, an assistant professor at the University of Barcelona. “This is definitely an inflexion point for long-term experiments that avoid the risky and disrupting movements out of the incubator or MEA [microelectrode array] devices to perform the required read-outs.”
