Tech companies such as Apple, Intel, and Nvidia use every marketing technique in the book to convince us that their new products are the most powerful to date. And they’re not lying. But it is true that the world of computing is no longer advancing at the pace it did a few decades ago. The CPUs in new computers and mobile phones barely gain 10% in performance each year. This is an insignificant improvement when we look back to the beginning of the millennium, when power doubled every couple of years. The limits of silicon are getting closer and closer. Some companies’ plans for the future already point to biocomputers as the perfect alternative.
“Brain in a Chip” as a response to the collapse of Moore’s Law
Growing a brain is nothing new. For the past 50 years, neuroscientists around the world have been studying the human brain in order to replicate it in machine form. The biggest breakthrough in this field came in 2013, when it was discovered that stem cells can be organized into three-dimensional structures called brain organoids.
Unlike flat neuron cultures in Petri dishes, scientists are able to replicate brain organoids, creating complex structures. However, these advances are still in their infancy. These systems are capable of understanding simple words or playing Pong for a few seconds. But we still have a long way to go before we need to worry about them becoming self-aware and rebelling against their creators, as happened to the Space Pirates in Metroid.
Buy the rumor, sell the news
The most astute among you will be asking yourselves the million-dollar question. If these advances took place in 2013… Why has it suddenly become so important? Well, the answer will not surprise you at all. Indeed, it is because of Artificial Intelligence.
But no, it’s not that we suddenly need to replicate Stephen Hawking’s brain to program ChatGPT 6.0. Nor has Nvidia reached the limits of its technology. Biocomputers have suddenly become interesting because investors who have made a fortune with Artificial Intelligence have already cashed in by selling their shares in Nvidia, TSMC, and ASML, among many others.
Now that all the interesting companies in the computing world are trading at absurd PER multiples, all these “Wall Street wolves” are ready for their next assault. Synthetic brains may sound like science fiction. But let’s be honest: so was the software in the movie Her (2013). And today we all talk to Gemini and OpenAI without thinking it’s alien technology.
What will be the new “Nvidia” of Biocore?
Although the scientific breakthrough occurred a decade ago with the discovery of organoids, their practical implementation is a more recent phenomenon. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have matured thanks to the injection of capital they have received since then. As a result, we are in the midst of a “gold rush,” with companies competing to be the first to offer biological processing power.
The most interesting case is that of Cortical Labs in Australia. In 2022, they demonstrated that their cultured neurons were capable of playing Pong. The cells received electrical stimuli (such as the “vision” of the game) and sent signals to move the paddle. The most interesting thing was the language used by the company: they called their creation “embodied sentience.” This term generated immediate controversy among neuroscientists, who considered it ethically irresponsible. But it was a success, as the media picked up on it and channeled a lot of investment.
But the experts at Cortical Labs are not alone in this race. Swiss company FinalSpark has gone one step further. Its goal is to ultimately offer a service that could be defined as “neurons as a service” (NaaS). The company’s goal is to enable researchers around the world to access and rent biological processing power through the cloud, using neural organoids to perform complex calculations that silicon cannot yet handle efficiently.
In any case, the usefulness of these organoids is not limited to processing power. If science advances in this field, pharmacology and toxicology could undergo a revolution, with direct studies on human brain tissue. Thanks to these technologies, experts believe that we could finally find a cure for diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Animal testing would also come to an end, although we are sure that this new field will also generate a great deal of moral dilemmas.