This $35,000 Computer Is Powered by Trapped Human Brain Cells

Cortical Labs would like to sell you a brain in a box. It’ll cost about $35,000, and you can teach it to do all kinds of nifty things. If that’s out of your price range, you can sign up for its ‘Wetware-as-a-Service’ and rent bio-computer processing power from a rack of living tissues welded to machines. It’ll be in the cloud.

Cortical Labs has been working on this computer for six years and detailed many of its features in New Atlas. The computer is called the CL1, and the company is already taking orders with plans to ship them out later this year.

The New Atlas article is built around a long interview with Cortical Labs’s Chief Scientific Officer, Brett Kagan. He said that the CL1 is powered by lab-grown neurons that are placed on a planar electrode array. “Basically just metal and glass.” The lab-made hunk of brain is hooked up to 59 electrodes that create a stable neural network. This is all plugged into a “life-support unit” and hooked up to a proprietary software system.

“We have pumps like the heart. Waste. Feeding reservoirs. Filtration units like the kidneys. And we have a gas mixer to take carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen,” Cortical Labs CEO Hon Weng Chong told Reuters in a video walkthrough of the machine.

The marketing of the CL1 on the Cortical Labs website is morbid. “Real neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying them with everything they need to be healthy,” the website says. “They grow across a silicon chip, which sends and receives electrical impulses into the neural structure.”

And what’s the fate of this unholy melding of flesh and machine? “The world the neurons exist in is created by our Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS),” Cortical Labs says. “It runs a simulated world and sends information directly to the neurons about their environment. As the neurons react, their impulses affect their simulated world.”

And what are the applications for the wetware? Cortical Labs got an early version of the system to play Pong a few years ago. The pitch here is that the CL1 can match or exceed the performance of digital AI systems. “If you have 120 [CL1s], you can set up really well-controlled experiments to understand exactly what drives the appearance of intelligence, Kagan told New Atlas.

“You can break things down to the transcriptomic and genetic level to understand what genes and what proteins are actually driving one to learn and another not to learn,” he said. “And when you have all those units, you can immediately start to take the drug discovery and disease modeling approach.”

According to the Cortical Labs website, the CL1 is a “high-performance closed-loop system where real neurons interact with software in real time.” This “robust environment” can keep your wetware machine alive for up to 6 months. It’s also plug-and-play. The cloud version can support a wealth of USB devices.

Cortical Lab is just one of the groups pushing the frontiers of nightmare science by teaching stuff to play Pong as they search for alternatives to digital LLMs. Last year, a team of researchers at the University of Reading published a paper describing how they’d taught an ionic electroactive polymer hydrogel—a lump of goo—to play Pong.

The scientists said they were confident they could get the lump of goo to improve its Pong abilities if they figured out how to make it feel pain.