7 ms·

Scientists announce a new 'organoid intelligence' field

46 points by ofou 3y ago

LorenDB 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/02/world/brain-computer-organoids-scn/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://edition....
fvdessen 3y ago
Are neurons really more efficient at computing than transistors ?
- marricks 3y ago
  I imagine that’s a massive “depends on what you want them to do” Add numbers, no of course not, write a book though…
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Is it true even in that example? 251MJ is what 2000kcal diet for a month works out to. That’s also 2.5kW for 100 servers for 1000 seconds. Is it true that a human would write a better book in a month than a well-designed algorithm? Maybe.
    - marricks 3y ago
      If you want to go with imaginary algorithms that don’t exist yet (or possibly ever) sure such an imaginary computer or system could do it more efficiently.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      What would design the algorithm?
    - Teever 3y ago
      Humans can't eat just anything though, and there's a tremendous amount of energy embodied in human food, including growing, storing, transporting and cookihg it.
      - Engineering-MD 3y ago
        And is also true for computers in different ways. Human food comes included in the natural Environment, electricity requires some degree of commercial mining.
    - vasco 3y ago
      > Is it true that a human would write a better book in a month than a well-designed algorithm? The "well designed" plays a big role in this sentence. At some point you're just writing the book with a different "pen".
- glenstein 3y ago
  My understanding is that neurons are simultaneously electrically active and chemically active, and are organized into larger systems that are dynamically plastic. Somewhere in there there's some efficiencies being achieved that come from being functionally active in ways that it don't make for an easy one to one comparison to transistors.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    According to https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2008/RM704.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... (1951) neurons (and, we know, transistors, also) wind up mapping onto (the same) basic finite automata mathematics.
    - glenstein 3y ago
      Right, lots of things can map onto models of computation described in typical theory of computation textbook, and that gives you your one to one comparison to transistors. You can also find equivalences between board games, lego, conways game of life etc. etc. But what I'm saying is, there is a layer (or layers) of organic function that is abstracted away in machine learning/AI. While the field does borrow ideas liberally from brain architecture (as it well should), you nevertheless have neurons doing things like chemical signalling, metabolic regulation, unique site-specific structural organization, and processes for dynamic reorganization of structure as needed. That is, not just in the informational representation, which can be sufficiently abstract to model practically anything, but in the hardware itself upon which the information rests. It's there that I suspect there are efficiencies gained by brains over transistors.
- nicklecompte 3y ago
  Neurons aren't anything like transistors: they're CPU cores, and each individual neuron in a mammalian cerebral cortex is the equivalent of a deep artificial neural network: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i... In particular the human brain is an 80-billion core processor with each core running at 300Hz. Its architecture is not so good at FLOPs and other things we typically use computers for, but overall human brains dramatically outperform anything in 2024 except the world's fastest supercomputer.
  - spiderice 3y ago
    > overall Meaning at specific tasks, right? Because obviously even the weakest modern computers out perform humans at certain kinds of tasks.
    - nicklecompte 3y ago
      No, I mean in terms of raw computational power: 300Hz * 80 billion cores. Again the architecture does not work well for churning through a giant array of floating point arithmetic since 300Hz is a limiting factor for that specific type of computation. But that's not the kind of problem the human brain was designed to solve.
  - wruza 3y ago
    I think the correct term is “outclasses”, not “outperforms”. Our performance is pretty bad, especially on average and compared to other species (when comparable).
  - usrbinbash 3y ago
    > they're CPU cores, No, they are really not. A Neuron on its own is capable of exactly one thing, and that's signal integration from it's dendrites. That's it. Wait until the excitation potential reaches the point where the Potassium channels switch and boum: Signal cascade goes down the axon. The only moderation a single neuron is capable of, is varying signal resistance to filter out repeating noise. > https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i... Computational complexity doesn't indicate computational capability. There are any number of systems that stubbornly refuse to be capable supercomputers, despite being incredibly hard to simulate. Accurately simulating every aspect of the liquid flow through an acorn leaf, with it's billions of micro and nanometer channels, would easily be one of the most difficult tasks in the history of computing, and yet, acorn leaves are not even capable of the simplest thought, and the entire modus operandi of water flow through an entire tree can be accurately summarized in a simple 1-page diagram. Every single muscle fiber with its trillions of moving cytoskeleton components, has a much higher complexity than a neuron, that doesn't mean muscles are supercomputers.
rokkitmensch 3y ago
Risible storage claims. I know first hand that biological storage is quite lossy with miserable ECC.
- philipswood 3y ago
  You're just looking at the default garage collector settings...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
dosinga 3y ago
Can anybody point me to a better introduction into organoid intelligence? This all looks important and interesting, but this article seems to be all over the place. Turing test and CAPTCHA are not very convincing arguments brains beat AI. Brains store 2,500 (terabytes)? I'd like to see a source for that. Most brains I meet don't seem to know more about the world than a 7B LLM
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I’m not an LLM guy… how large on disk is a 7B LLM? (Minstrel is specific is needed, but a range would be great)
  - Feorn 3y ago
    A completely unquantized fp16 model weight 7B LLM is about 15GB on a disk. You need closer to 24GB of memory for inference with a decently sized context. Quantization is black magic of the software variety that seems to be able to significantly reduce that without a commensurate loss in quality, though the results are a little subjective. Some well reviewed quantizations of 7B models can get them below 9GB.
- Feorn 3y ago
  Most brains don't treat themselves to an abundance of training data, the ones who do seem pretty knowledgeable to me. Witty comment aside, the human brain is pretty efficient in terms of energy use considering it's taking in a ton of data while it's conscious. Two each audio and video streams, olfactory, gustatory, touch, vestibular, and all the interoception. Inference and training in real time. All for the low price of 125 watts, a quarter that if you're just measuring the brain and not the whole body. The paper was published last year. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.338... I'm not convinced this field will outpace silicon or whatever succeeds it, considering how big the semiconductor industry is.
  - vasco 3y ago
    All for the low price of 125 watts, but you need to sleep one fourth of the time, during which it doesn't do much, and on the other three thirds "Most brains don't treat themselves to an abundance of training data". I'm not sure I'd call this machine efficient at using its computational power.
hiddencost 3y ago
You know it's fund raising because it uses the word "announce" and because it's published in a "Frontiers" journal.
givemeethekeys 3y ago
What is the limit? I imagine fully sentient super-humans. Somewhere in between the Kings from Foundation and the androids from Bladerunner. Or perhaps both - the Kings from Foundation ruling over Androids from Bladerunner in a world ever so decreasingly "natural".
- ganzuul 3y ago
  Neon Genesis Evangelion
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    get in the robot ganzuul
    - ganzuul 3y ago
      Not you too.
slipperybeluga 3y ago
[dead]
egypturnash 3y ago
I wonder if any of the people working in this field write SF that ponders the many thorny ethical knots this involves. There's a paragraph late in the article that makes it clear they are aware of them.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  > the many thorny ethical knots this involves On the one hand, we have tiny, artifical lumps of vat-grown neurons, that lack any self-awareness, emotions or even basic pain reception (because, you know, you kinda need a whole sensory apparatus for this). On the other hand, we have living, breathing, feeling beings with complex social and emotional lives, capable of experiencing joy, sadness, horror, panic, friendship and attachment. Oh, and they absolutely can feel pain. Also known as pigs, cows, chickens and other vertebrate farm animals. Now, humanity kills about 80 billion such farm animals per year. [1] So how do the "many thorny ethical knots" compare to that if I may ask? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter
  - naasking 3y ago
    > Now, humanity kills about 80 billion such farm animals per year. [1] Ostensibly, those animals are killed for sustenance, where lab intelligences will be created, poked , prodded, altered and killed merely for fun or curiosity. Even if we disagree on the ethics of eating meat, hopefully we at least agree that there's a meaningful difference there, especially since we don't know where the boundary of "basic pain reception", or indeed any kind of experience, truly lies.
    - Teever 3y ago
      Except eating meat is unnecessary and ultimately unsustainable for the planet. So really people like me who eat meat are guilty two sins -- eating intelligent creatures that don't need to be eaten and destroying the planet by doing so. also, don't underplay the utility of this kind of research, people don't just do it for funsies, they do it because it could change the world.
    - 3y ago
SubiculumCode 3y ago
I submitted this recently; a most fascinating talk about.ensembles of multicellular organoids https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577133
Jerrrry 3y ago
>any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^23 integer or floating-point operations." >using primarily biological sequence data I was wondering about that bit. Those who are straying from gods light the fastest are firmly in the shadows.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Growing mammalian cell spheroids in vitro was one of the highlights for me and my scientific career. So rewarding and interesting, so much more useful than monolayer cell cultures. The article is about neurons, but they are fascinating in cancer research also. You can grow fibroblasts together with cancer cells and they start making something like a real tumor and start exhibiting responses more like in vivo tumors. My favorite way to grow them was just seed the cells in special plates that the cells don't want to attach to and they just start attaching to one another and start making a colony of self-organizing cells floating in the media. A good overview here- https://cancerci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12935-021-01853-8 https://cancerci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12935-0...
palad1n 3y ago
Well, this will in no way be a means by which an eldritch horror enters into this dimension.
barbarr 3y ago
Ah sweet, man made horrors beyond our comprehension.
halgir 3y ago
Obligatory I have no mouth and I must scream.
justaj 3y ago
So in other words... wetware?
halgir 3y ago
> While ChatGPT can efficiently collect information on the internet, it can’t react to a change in temperature like a cultured cellular system can, he wrote. Is there a qualitative difference between an LLM looking up the temperature on the internet (or getting it from an attached thermometer) and an animal brain receiving it from a thermoreceptor? The latter may be more integrated, but it sounds functionally identical to me.

46 points by ofou 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/02/world/brain-computer-organoids-scn/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://edition....

fvdessen 3y ago

Are neurons really more efficient at computing than transistors ?

marricks 3y ago
I imagine that’s a massive “depends on what you want them to do” Add numbers, no of course not, write a book though…
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Is it true even in that example? 251MJ is what 2000kcal diet for a month works out to. That’s also 2.5kW for 100 servers for 1000 seconds. Is it true that a human would write a better book in a month than a well-designed algorithm? Maybe.
  - marricks 3y ago
    If you want to go with imaginary algorithms that don’t exist yet (or possibly ever) sure such an imaginary computer or system could do it more efficiently.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    What would design the algorithm?
  - Teever 3y ago
    Humans can't eat just anything though, and there's a tremendous amount of energy embodied in human food, including growing, storing, transporting and cookihg it.
    - Engineering-MD 3y ago
      And is also true for computers in different ways. Human food comes included in the natural Environment, electricity requires some degree of commercial mining.
  - vasco 3y ago
    > Is it true that a human would write a better book in a month than a well-designed algorithm? The "well designed" plays a big role in this sentence. At some point you're just writing the book with a different "pen".
glenstein 3y ago
My understanding is that neurons are simultaneously electrically active and chemically active, and are organized into larger systems that are dynamically plastic. Somewhere in there there's some efficiencies being achieved that come from being functionally active in ways that it don't make for an easy one to one comparison to transistors.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  According to https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2008/RM704.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... (1951) neurons (and, we know, transistors, also) wind up mapping onto (the same) basic finite automata mathematics.
  - glenstein 3y ago
    Right, lots of things can map onto models of computation described in typical theory of computation textbook, and that gives you your one to one comparison to transistors. You can also find equivalences between board games, lego, conways game of life etc. etc. But what I'm saying is, there is a layer (or layers) of organic function that is abstracted away in machine learning/AI. While the field does borrow ideas liberally from brain architecture (as it well should), you nevertheless have neurons doing things like chemical signalling, metabolic regulation, unique site-specific structural organization, and processes for dynamic reorganization of structure as needed. That is, not just in the informational representation, which can be sufficiently abstract to model practically anything, but in the hardware itself upon which the information rests. It's there that I suspect there are efficiencies gained by brains over transistors.
nicklecompte 3y ago
Neurons aren't anything like transistors: they're CPU cores, and each individual neuron in a mammalian cerebral cortex is the equivalent of a deep artificial neural network: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i... In particular the human brain is an 80-billion core processor with each core running at 300Hz. Its architecture is not so good at FLOPs and other things we typically use computers for, but overall human brains dramatically outperform anything in 2024 except the world's fastest supercomputer.
- spiderice 3y ago
  > overall Meaning at specific tasks, right? Because obviously even the weakest modern computers out perform humans at certain kinds of tasks.
  - nicklecompte 3y ago
    No, I mean in terms of raw computational power: 300Hz * 80 billion cores. Again the architecture does not work well for churning through a giant array of floating point arithmetic since 300Hz is a limiting factor for that specific type of computation. But that's not the kind of problem the human brain was designed to solve.
- wruza 3y ago
  I think the correct term is “outclasses”, not “outperforms”. Our performance is pretty bad, especially on average and compared to other species (when comparable).
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  > they're CPU cores, No, they are really not. A Neuron on its own is capable of exactly one thing, and that's signal integration from it's dendrites. That's it. Wait until the excitation potential reaches the point where the Potassium channels switch and boum: Signal cascade goes down the axon. The only moderation a single neuron is capable of, is varying signal resistance to filter out repeating noise. > https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i... Computational complexity doesn't indicate computational capability. There are any number of systems that stubbornly refuse to be capable supercomputers, despite being incredibly hard to simulate. Accurately simulating every aspect of the liquid flow through an acorn leaf, with it's billions of micro and nanometer channels, would easily be one of the most difficult tasks in the history of computing, and yet, acorn leaves are not even capable of the simplest thought, and the entire modus operandi of water flow through an entire tree can be accurately summarized in a simple 1-page diagram. Every single muscle fiber with its trillions of moving cytoskeleton components, has a much higher complexity than a neuron, that doesn't mean muscles are supercomputers.

rokkitmensch 3y ago

Risible storage claims. I know first hand that biological storage is quite lossy with miserable ECC.

philipswood 3y ago
You're just looking at the default garage collector settings...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

dosinga 3y ago

Can anybody point me to a better introduction into organoid intelligence? This all looks important and interesting, but this article seems to be all over the place. Turing test and CAPTCHA are not very convincing arguments brains beat AI. Brains store 2,500 (terabytes)? I'd like to see a source for that. Most brains I meet don't seem to know more about the world than a 7B LLM

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
I’m not an LLM guy… how large on disk is a 7B LLM? (Minstrel is specific is needed, but a range would be great)
- Feorn 3y ago
  A completely unquantized fp16 model weight 7B LLM is about 15GB on a disk. You need closer to 24GB of memory for inference with a decently sized context. Quantization is black magic of the software variety that seems to be able to significantly reduce that without a commensurate loss in quality, though the results are a little subjective. Some well reviewed quantizations of 7B models can get them below 9GB.
Feorn 3y ago
Most brains don't treat themselves to an abundance of training data, the ones who do seem pretty knowledgeable to me. Witty comment aside, the human brain is pretty efficient in terms of energy use considering it's taking in a ton of data while it's conscious. Two each audio and video streams, olfactory, gustatory, touch, vestibular, and all the interoception. Inference and training in real time. All for the low price of 125 watts, a quarter that if you're just measuring the brain and not the whole body. The paper was published last year. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.338... I'm not convinced this field will outpace silicon or whatever succeeds it, considering how big the semiconductor industry is.
- vasco 3y ago
  All for the low price of 125 watts, but you need to sleep one fourth of the time, during which it doesn't do much, and on the other three thirds "Most brains don't treat themselves to an abundance of training data". I'm not sure I'd call this machine efficient at using its computational power.

hiddencost 3y ago

You know it's fund raising because it uses the word "announce" and because it's published in a "Frontiers" journal.

givemeethekeys 3y ago

What is the limit? I imagine fully sentient super-humans. Somewhere in between the Kings from Foundation and the androids from Bladerunner. Or perhaps both - the Kings from Foundation ruling over Androids from Bladerunner in a world ever so decreasingly "natural".

ganzuul 3y ago
Neon Genesis Evangelion
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  get in the robot ganzuul
  - ganzuul 3y ago
    Not you too.

slipperybeluga 3y ago

[dead]

egypturnash 3y ago

I wonder if any of the people working in this field write SF that ponders the many thorny ethical knots this involves. There's a paragraph late in the article that makes it clear they are aware of them.

usrbinbash 3y ago
> the many thorny ethical knots this involves On the one hand, we have tiny, artifical lumps of vat-grown neurons, that lack any self-awareness, emotions or even basic pain reception (because, you know, you kinda need a whole sensory apparatus for this). On the other hand, we have living, breathing, feeling beings with complex social and emotional lives, capable of experiencing joy, sadness, horror, panic, friendship and attachment. Oh, and they absolutely can feel pain. Also known as pigs, cows, chickens and other vertebrate farm animals. Now, humanity kills about 80 billion such farm animals per year. [1] So how do the "many thorny ethical knots" compare to that if I may ask? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter
- naasking 3y ago
  > Now, humanity kills about 80 billion such farm animals per year. [1] Ostensibly, those animals are killed for sustenance, where lab intelligences will be created, poked , prodded, altered and killed merely for fun or curiosity. Even if we disagree on the ethics of eating meat, hopefully we at least agree that there's a meaningful difference there, especially since we don't know where the boundary of "basic pain reception", or indeed any kind of experience, truly lies.
  - Teever 3y ago
    Except eating meat is unnecessary and ultimately unsustainable for the planet. So really people like me who eat meat are guilty two sins -- eating intelligent creatures that don't need to be eaten and destroying the planet by doing so. also, don't underplay the utility of this kind of research, people don't just do it for funsies, they do it because it could change the world.
  - 3y ago

SubiculumCode 3y ago

I submitted this recently; a most fascinating talk about.ensembles of multicellular organoids https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577133

Jerrrry 3y ago

>any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^23 integer or floating-point operations." >using primarily biological sequence data I was wondering about that bit. Those who are straying from gods light the fastest are firmly in the shadows.

Mistletoe 3y ago

Growing mammalian cell spheroids in vitro was one of the highlights for me and my scientific career. So rewarding and interesting, so much more useful than monolayer cell cultures. The article is about neurons, but they are fascinating in cancer research also. You can grow fibroblasts together with cancer cells and they start making something like a real tumor and start exhibiting responses more like in vivo tumors. My favorite way to grow them was just seed the cells in special plates that the cells don't want to attach to and they just start attaching to one another and start making a colony of self-organizing cells floating in the media. A good overview here- https://cancerci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12935-021-01853-8 https://cancerci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12935-0...

palad1n 3y ago

Well, this will in no way be a means by which an eldritch horror enters into this dimension.

barbarr 3y ago

Ah sweet, man made horrors beyond our comprehension.

halgir 3y ago

Obligatory I have no mouth and I must scream.

justaj 3y ago

So in other words... wetware?

halgir 3y ago

> While ChatGPT can efficiently collect information on the internet, it can’t react to a change in temperature like a cultured cellular system can, he wrote. Is there a qualitative difference between an LLM looking up the temperature on the internet (or getting it from an attached thermometer) and an animal brain receiving it from a thermoreceptor? The latter may be more integrated, but it sounds functionally identical to me.