This is an extremely tiny computer consisting of 8 electrodes, but what if I told you it wasn’t connected to a silicon board, but rather to brain cells. This is what researchers with Swiss biotech startup FinalSpark say is their new biocomputer, one that mimics the neural network of the brain and could be the future of computing.
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00:00This is an extremely tiny computer, consisting of 8 electrodes.
00:07What if I told you it wasn't connected to a silicon board, but rather to brain cells?
00:12This is what researchers with Swiss biotech startup FinalSpark say is their new biocomputer,
00:17one that mimics the neural network of the brain and could be the future of computing.
00:21The biocomputer doesn't simply use brains as a template, rather FinalSpark has lab-grown
00:26human brain cells to implement into the device.
00:29Each of these 16 organoids, as they call them, are connected to the electrodes in a
00:33fluid system, which feeds the cells.
00:35It's a wild concept, however the biocomputer uses significantly less energy as it mimics
00:40the efficiency of the brain, with the researchers saying it consumes a million times less power
00:45than traditional digital processors.
00:47For reference, FinalSpark says that to train an AI model like ChatGPT, it required some
00:5210 gigawatt hours, the equivalent of 6,000 times the energy usage of a single EU citizen
00:58for a year.
00:59ScienceAlert reports that the human brain only uses the equivalent of 0.3 kilowatt hours
01:04per day, a fraction of a fraction of that.
01:07FinalSpark says that its biocomputer can currently be kept alive and computing for 100 days,
01:12with scientists already using its organoid brain for research purposes.