Living neurons integrated into modern AI processing, claims SF startup — biological computing power used to boost computer vision, generative video, and more

(Image credit: The Biological Computing Company)

A San Francisco-based startup claims to be the first to have created a biological computing platform built from living neurons, purposed to accelerate artificial intelligence-based tasks. The Biological Computing Company (TBC) reckons this is a credible pathway to replace, or augment, silicon compute in AI, with support for processes like “computer vision, generative video, and AI infrastructure.” Alongside the bold claims, it is revealed that TBC has secured $25m in funding from its initial seed round and will open a new flagship lab in the city.

TBC was founded by two neuroscientists who are seeking to use “the most elusive, yet obvious idea in computer science – using the real brain for computing,” notes an email received by Tom’s Hardware. Moreover, the communication boasts that “biological computing can process foundational AI models 5x faster than silicon-based chips alone, requiring less power, generating greater accuracy, and reaching the scale that today’s AI ecosystem requires.”

It is this kind of bold vision for a new class of AI infrastructure that has inspired the delivery of $25m in funding. However, at this early stage, we note that little of real substance has been publicly revealed to satisfy the curious minds of Tom’s Hardware readers. We did enjoy looking at some of the computer vision, generative video, and algorithm discovery results found in the ‘Today’ section of TBC’s home page, though.

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The details we have about TBC’s work say that the firm “encodes real-world data (e.g., images, video) into living neurons, then decodes neural activity into richer representations mapped onto state-of-the-art AI models through modular adapters.” This is piped through TBC's Algorithm Discovery platform to bolster the AI compute layer. Thus, in effect, the TBC wetware and software works on the intersection of neuroscience and AI. That seems fitting, as TBC co-founders Alex Ksendsovsky, MD, PhD, and Jon Pomeraniec, MD, MBA, are both neurosurgeon-neuroscientists.

“We're at the ground level of paradigm shift, of what comes next, after language, after silicon," says Pomeraniec. The promise of "building infrastructure to understand and interact with the world in a fundamentally new way" is tantalizing, but the details publicly shared by the company so far are too vague to properly assess. This concern is magnified by the very bold claims of TBC. Moreover, we’ve seen some interviews with the co-founders talk about a ten-to-20-year plan for its neurons in real-time compute integration. So, please stay tuned for a decade or two.

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

6 Comments Comment from the forums

bit_user

Sounds to me like they're only using living neurons in the early training phase, but they've got some way of replicating what those neurons did in the digital domain, for fine tuning and deployment at scale. That's an interesting idea, but I think it probably won't take long to unlock any secrets responsible for a performance advantage in biological neurons and replicate them in classical model architectures.

Anyway, if I understand correctly, this is the most plausible play I've seen of utilizing neurons in AI tech at scale. Assuming their technology works and can scale to real-world models, of course.
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Gururu

We should be eating steaks made of neurons not spending millions on this boondoggle.
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bit_user

Gururu said:
We should be eating steaks made of neurons
AFAIK, cow brains were fully excluded from the human food supply after the Mad Cow Disease scare, decades ago.

It was even found that infected cow brains fed to chickens could result in chicken feces containing defective prions. Chicken feces are normally incorporated into cow feed, as the more efficient bovine digestive tract can extract residual nutrients from chicken waste. So, I guess bovine brains are now just treated as a waste product.
Reply
Gururu

bit_user said:
AFAIK, cow brains were fully excluded from the human food supply after the Mad Cow Disease scare, decades ago.

It was even found that infected cow brains fed to chickens could result in chicken feces containing defective prions. Chicken feces are normally incorporated into cow feed, as the more efficient bovine digestive tract can extract residual nutrients from chicken waste. So, I guess bovine brains are now just treated as a waste product.
It's not prohibited to eat it, but yes those days led me to consider limiting my beef intake for a while. Those proteins are crazy durable and can get around during processing.
Reply
bit_user

Gururu said:
It's not prohibited to eat it, but yes those days led me to consider limiting my beef intake for a while. Those proteins are crazy durable and can get around during processing.
I didn't eat beef for an entire year! Then, I forgot and ate a bowl of chili that turned out to include ground beef in a German pub. Once I noticed, all I could do was hope it wasn't British beef!

Not long after that, I decided to add it back into my diet, since the nightmare scenario of everyone getting mad cow disease didn't seem to be playing out.
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80251

I knew someone who died of Mad Cow disease, his body was NOT released to his family ever.
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