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Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]
- dlcarrier 7mo agoI've never understood why they do this research with human neurons when any neurons would do.
- jmusall 7mo agoPlaying the devil's advocate: Why not use human neurons? Are they different to animal neurons and if they are, wouldn't that make it even more interesting?
- booleandilemma 7mo agoFuture robots will be powered by human brain cells. Companies will use them as conscious slaves and they'll get around slavery laws by saying they're not human.
- DoktorDelta 7mo agoThe androids will dream of electric sheep.
- Mistletoe 7mo agoI’m reminded of the brain in a jar robots from Fallout.
- dustfinger 7mo ago> We’ve combined lab-grown neurons with silicon chips and made it available to anyone, for first time ever. There is a line somewhere here that I personally feel we should not cross.
- virgildotcodes 7mo ago100% We know that neurons can produce subjective experience. This is the first time in my life that I've felt a scientific avenue of research should shut down.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- vixen99 7mo agoAt the very very least there are more productive ways of spending time.
- blizdiddy 7mo agoAnimal testing, weapons testing, medical trials, cloning, psychological experiments… had you just never considered them before? Why this?
- thierrydamiba 7mo agoSame reason people get scared to fly but drive everyday. Humans are simultaneously wildly irrational and terrible at calculating risk.
- api 7mo agoNot sure why this is being downvoted. It’s a valid point. This neuron chip stuff is far less problematic than a lot of animal testing where you clearly have a whole organism that experiences something. Factory farming too. The way we treat chickens in particular is out of a horror movie, and that’s in countries with some standards. Globally I’m sure many billions of animals are constantly submitted to the most grotesque torture for food.
- ryeights 7mo agoThose things all exist within our conscious realm. “Human brain cells in a vat used for computation” suggests horrors beyond understanding
- NegativeLatency 7mo agoThis is somewhat novel unlike say weapons manufacturing. Also assuming that the GP is in the tech community to some degree, it makes sense they’d have a stronger reaction. There’s lots of bad stuff humans shouldn’t be doing.
- 7mo ago
- ZunarJ5 7mo agoTo be a fly on the wall in that ethics committee meeting...
- exe34 7mo agoI have no mouth and I must scream.
- wigster 7mo agoit is a terrifying thought.
- DetroitThrow 7mo agoWe grew a brain on a petri dish, gave it a shotgun, and sent it to hell. Next up, we teach it to speed run Getting Over It. What a horrible existence.
- throwaway613746 7mo ago[dead]
- doug_durham 7mo agoI’m confused by this statement. A neuron is a machine. A silicon chip computer is a machine. All they have done is interfaced two machines.
- birdsongs 7mo agoThis is naive or in bad faith. Sure, a neuron is a machine. 200,000 neurons connected in a matrix is a brain, albeit a very primitive one. Ants have 250,000 neurons in their brains.
- doug_durham 7mo agoHow is it naive? You admit that an individual neuron is a machine. 200k neurons in a petri dish isn't a brain. I'm not the naive one here.
- kingkawn 7mo agoWasn’t this the original conceptualization for the Matrix?
- 00N8 7mo agoSpeaking of earlier concepts of The Matrix, there's an old 1973 German movie/mini series World on a Wire that's really good.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoWasn't the matrix using humans as some sort of power source/batteries? I may be misremembering though, as that seems pretty silly in retrospect ..
- kingkawn 7mo agoYes, but as I’ve read it that was to simplify it at studio demand for 1999 audiences. The original conception was to use human minds as coprocessors
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoThat sure would have made a lot more sense, unfortunate that they went with the battery story in the end.
- tjpnz 7mo agoOther way around - the machines were using human brains as a substrate for computing. If they can get Doom to run on a pregnancy test surely they could get it running on human brain cells?
- neom 7mo agoIt seems a bit more complicated than first blush: https://www.rdworldonline.com/the-neurons-playing-doom-are-actually-testing-a-theory-of-intelligence/ https://www.rdworldonline.com/the-neurons-playing-doom-are-a... Personally, dislike this direction a lot. I don't like that they're using a killing game (I understand the trope, doesn't make me like it any less) and the general idea of this whole thing makes me quite uneasy.
- sunir 7mo agoDo you feel like you have no mouth and you must scream?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- oersted 7mo ago> The neurons serve as a biological filter: the training system translates screen pixels and ray-cast distances into electrical zaps, the living cells fire spikes, and those counts feed straight into a PyTorch decoder that maps them to Doom actions. The PPO agent, CNN encoder and entire reward loop run on ordinary silicon elsewhere. Cole’s ablation modes make the split testable, set decoder output to random or zero and the game still plays. The CL1 hardware interface works exactly as advertised. What remains unproven is whether 200,000 human neurons can ever carry the policy instead of just riding along. Yeah… That’s quite the smoking gun. So it’s quite likely then that the neurons are just acting as a bad conductor. The electrodes read a noisy version of the signals that go into the neurons, and they just train a CNN with PPO to remove that noise, get the proper inputs, and learn a half-decent policy for playing the game. If this worked as advertised they shouldn’t need a CNN decoder at all! The raw neuron readout should be interpreted as game inputs directly. Besides, they are not streaming the video into the neurons at all. Just the horizontal position of the enemies and the distance, or some variant of that. In that sense it’s barely more than pong isn’t it? If enemy left, rotate left, if enemy right, rotate right, if enemy center shoot. At a stretch, if enemy far, go forward, if enemy close, go back. The rest of the time just move randomly. Indeed, the behavior in the video is essentially that… While we are at it, the encoded input signal itself is already pretty close to a decent policy if mapped directly to the keys (how much enemy left, center, right), even without any CNN, PPO or neurons. EDIT: It seems like the readme does address these concerns, and the described setup differs significantly from the description in the critical blogpost. Still not entirely convincing to me, a lot of weights being trained in silicon around the neurons, but it sounds better. I don’t have time right now to look deeper into it. They outline some interesting details though. > Quote from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron/main/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron/mai... Isn't the decoder/PPO doing all the learning? No, this is precisely why there are ablations. The footage you see in the video was taken using a 0-bias full linear readout decoder, meaning that the action selected is a linear function of the output spikes from the CL1; the CL1 is doing the learning. There is a noticeable difference when using the ablation (both random and 0 spikes result in zero learning) versus actual CL1 spikes. Isn't the encoder/PPO doing all the learning? This question largely assumes that the cells are static, which is incorrect; it is not a memory-less feed X in get Y machine. Both the policy and the cells are dynamical systems; biological neurons have an internal state (membrane potential, synaptic weights, adaptation currents). The same stimulation delivered at different points in training will produce different spike patterns, because the neurons have been conditioned by prior feedback. During testing, we froze encoder weights and still observed improvements in the reward. How is DOOM converted to electrical signals? We train an encoder in our PPO policy that dictates the stimulation pattern (frequency, amplitude, pulses, and even which channels to stimulate). Because the CL1 spikes are non-differentiable, the encoder is trained through PPO policy gradients using the log-likelihood trick (REINFORCE-style), i.e., by including the encoder’s sampled stimulation log-probs in the PPO objective rather than backpropagating through spikes.
- fsmv 7mo agoI'm having trouble understanding to what extent the machine learning used for interfacing with the neurons is doing the learning
- sillysaurusx 7mo agoBe sure to dig into the details before taking this at face value. There once was a story "Rat brain flies plane" a couple decades ago, and it turned out to be bogus. But to find that out, you had to read the paper and reverse engineer that nothing substantial was actually going on. It's tempting to be charitable, but you can't really know whether headlines like this are legit till you understand exactly what they did. (The rat brain guys repeated the experiment until the plane stopped crashing, but no "learning" was happening; it was expected that when the neuron's range reached so-and-so, that the plane would fly level. So they started with a neuron outside that range, showed that it crashed, then adjusted the neuron until it flew level. But that's not what "rat brain flies plane" implies.)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- birdsongs 7mo agoI looked into it. They're not feeding the framebuffer to the neurons, but have a "signal" when an enemy is on screen to some of the tissue's inputs, and how to locate it in the x/y axis, and have outputs for the character to turn right or left or fire. It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which seems consistent with the title. It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can interface with and send out / receive electrical impulses. They let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or punishment signals (unclear to me what those are). Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't experienced much with tech. The telling thing for me is, all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics or try to mitigate concerns. We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Have we defined it? Can we, if we don't understand it ourselves? What are the plans to scale up? It's legitimately horrifying to me.
- birdsongs 7mo agoReplying to myself: how long before one of these with the neuron count of a corvid and trained on pattern recognition gets plugged into a drone? This is a very dark path, and I could not trust the people in charge less.
- Frieren 7mo agoBillions of living human brain cells have played Doom in a number of different devices for a couple of decades now. What would be surprising is for dead human cells to play anything at all.
- lp4v4n 7mo agoIt’s the first time I’ve heard about this company, and of course I haven’t taken the time to check how real their product is, but honestly, for me it’s very difficult to believe we currently have the technology to correctly integrate a living neuron into a chip, let alone compute anything meaningful with it. From what I’ve read elsewhere, our understanding of neurons is still very basic, and we need a lot more fundamental research before reaching results like these. We still don’t even properly know how migraines work, nor can we cure paraplegia, yet somehow we supposedly have the capacity to grow second brains and program them on top of that.
- everforward 7mo agoI haven’t looked into it deeply either. To my knowledge, we understand how an individual neuron works quite well. We just don’t really understand macro effects in large networks of neurons. The video seems buzz wordy. Without looking into this too deeply, it seems like they’re using neurons individually or in small groups rather than creating a true “brain”. I would guess they’re using neurons or small groups of them sort of like transistors that do a single basic thing rather than a full “brain” that they just feed images to.
- lp4v4n 7mo agoMaybe I wasn’t explicit about this point, but I’m not only talking about understanding the biological processes behind a neuron. I’m also talking about our ability to manipulate them in something like an industrial process, combining them with hardware in a controlled way and achieving reliable results. Cells have a metabolism, right? They need to be fed and require a specific environment to survive. They age and can die, and they can be attacked by other microorganisms. Are all of these problems solved and applicable on an industrial scale? I had no idea. Why aren’t we fixing people’s retinas and paraplegia if we can manipulate neurons with that level of precision?
- Gooblebrai 7mo agoYou don't need to understand how neurons work in detail to be able to use them to do something. In the past, we were able to use electricity for various purposes without knowing about electrons.
- rickcarlino 7mo agoIt is going to be quite the ethical dilemma if/when these machines produce text output comparable to a modern LLM...
- ivell 7mo agoWhen they answer back to us in personal pronouns, we will always be wondering if it is like LLM just putting most probable words together or something really sentient. When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really a disembodied person or just a smart answering machine? A whole lot of ethical and psychological issues are to open up here.
- nilamo 7mo ago> When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really a disembodied person or just a smart answering machine? And when you put that virtual girlfriend's brain into a sex bot, is it rape?
- bronlund 7mo agoSo the whole reality for this little brain is literally pure hell :D
- ReptileMan 7mo agoIt's doom. It's a survival horror. You are the horror, the monsters try to survive.
- unsharted 7mo agoI have no mouth and I must rip and tear.
- wonger156 7mo agoHard to tell If the neurons actually learned to play doom or if its just the decoder that learned from the neuron responses. The disease modeling for this system is a very cool usecase though.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rolph 7mo agothere is a reading room of sorts: https://corticallabs.com/research https://corticallabs.com/research
- thezipcreator 7mo agowhat's with people inventing new torment nexuses every few weeks? could you people just chill, please?
- dang 7mo ago(We changed the URL from https://corticallabs.com/doom.html https://corticallabs.com/doom.html since it points to this)
- shevy-java 7mo agoSo THAT's why I can't finish within the scheduled timeline ...
- zeronight 7mo agoThe part I can't get past, where would you source live human brain cells? Does anyone have insight into how you would even start to source or grow/create the cells? Also the machines look very organic and clearly have to keep the cells alive. Do they have to change them out every so often?
- fenykep 7mo agoI think the Thought Emporium youtube channel has some explanatory [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw) of the whole process. I couldn't wrap my head around the thing tho.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoThere's a number of "immortal" human cell lines dating back to as far as the 1950s (you may have heard of Henrietta Lacks? [1] and the immortal HeLa cell line). Today there are several immortalized neuron cell lines used in research to model neuronal function, like HeLa but of neuron type obviously, that are also typically derived from tumours (e.g., SH-SY5Y, PC12) or immortalized via genetic modification (e.g., v-myc) like CTX0E03 [2] which was designed to allow for continuous growth in the presence of particular reagents. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks 2. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reneuron-announces-ctx-cell-line-shows-further-potential-301054631.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reneuron-announces-...
- Aerroon 7mo agoThis definitely helped with my disgust reaction.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoBesides not getting consent in the case of HeLa, which part do you find problematic? Cancerous cell's ability to self-clone/grow is as much a feature as it is a bug in this particular use case. I ask as someone who's has personally experienced loss of several loved ones from cancer (as most people my age probably have), but doesn't share your aversion to this particular use case (research.)
- zeroq 7mo agoI literally can't wait for this petri dish to learn how to interact with LLMs and start vibe coding JS libraries.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo agoOld news. Google "my dog vibecoded a game".
- kakapo5672 7mo agoWhat if the braincell-vibe JS libraries turn out pretty much identical to the legacy human JS libraries, aside from being better-commented. That might lead to an existential crisis for some folks.
- polynomial 7mo ago"Petri dish rewrites React in Rust"
- max_ 7mo agoOI just turns out to be straight up unethical, immoral and disgusting for me.
- rezonant 7mo agoBut can it run Crysis?
- ethmarks 7mo agoIs there a reason they're using human brain cells specifically? This seems like it would also work with neurons from other creatures. I was under the impression that the relative intelligence of humans versus other animals was largely a function of brain cell quantity, not quality. Can 200k human brain cells really learn faster than 200k mouse brain cells? A more cynical take is that they're just using human brain cells for shock value. They chose DOOM because of the "can it run DOOM" meme, so they clearly value publicity a lot.
- Nux 7mo agoGives new meaning to "homo ludens"..
- kklisura 7mo agoIf we're gonna suspend ethics and morals in science, can we at least go back to human cloning?
- sd9 7mo agoIf this can be taken at face value... it's creepy. I get that they're doing it for the meme. But perhaps something getting close to human intelligence, made out of human cells, shouldn't be forced to play a violent video game without any alternative options? Does 'the meme' justify that? I dunno. Nothing against violent games myself. Just feels like it's starting to get quite questionable, ethically speaking.
- ytoawwhra92 7mo agoIt is creepy, I agree. I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-behavior-brain-upload https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-beha... > Watch the video closely. What you are seeing is not an animation. It is not a reinforcement learning policy mimicking biology. It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move. And the simulated world they put it in is a sort of purgatory-like environment.
- IshKebab 7mo agoIt's 200k neurons. Less than an ant has. Somewhat creepy, but if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. Still I don't understand why they would invite the extra creepy factor of using human brain cells rather than e.g. mouse brain cells. Surely it makes no difference biologically but it's going to lead to fewer comments like this.
- ytoawwhra92 7mo ago> if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. I'm not imagining that (although one assumes their plan is to scale this up), but nonetheless there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality. Of course we (as a species) have a long history of doing horrible things to living creatures in the name of science and progress. These stories evoke a different feeling for me, though.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo agoRemember when stem cell research was controversial? Hold my beer
- sva_ 7mo agoI feel like they probably could use another mammals neural cells and get similar results, but they use human cells because it'll get them attention - and that kind of rubs me the wrong way.
- hinkley 7mo agoWhoever thought people would become Dr Frankenstein for the karma.
- nomoreusernames 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ethmarks 7mo agoCounterpoint: a major use case for this technology would be to experiment on human brain structures to research and hopefully cure neurological diseases like Alzheimer's. If you want to cure Alzheimer's in humans, you might as well use human brain cells from the start. But yes, I agree that they're likely using human brain cells mainly because it's attention-getting.
- kdheiwns 7mo agoA more likely and immediate use case is having these mini humans autonomously pilot drones in which they'll kill big humans.
- hellzbellz123 7mo agoI could see the current admin using this as some sort of sick workaround to ethics. Not that they seem to care in the first place
- w4der 7mo agoKeep in mind that this is an Australian startup, and they already have some publications out on the ethics of doing this.
- jordwest 7mo agoFrom an article [1]: We can build out discreet systems of brain cells and use them for the purpose we want. They're not going to have traits like consciousness, and we're able to test and assess for that, and build away from it if there is that risk. Ah, I'm glad they've worked out what consciousness is. /s From their marketing website [2]: Neural compute on demand: We continuously monitor neural health and performance, ensuring optimal conditions and continuous access to an always-on network of living neurons. At what size of "neural compute" do we start to call it slavery? [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-labs-neuron-brain-chip/104996484 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-labs... [2] https://corticallabs.com/cloud https://corticallabs.com/cloud
- pear01 7mo agoFor those of you taken aback by this and perhaps seeking out some theoretical context this may be useful as a primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_computer Was surprised to see no mention of wetware in the comments.
- wonderwonder 7mo agoThere are a lot of things converging right now. Human brain cell computers. Neuralink Mapping of the fly brain and inserting it into a simulation? Ai We are potentially moving in the direction of uploading conciousness.
- jmcgough 7mo agoThese are all largely unrelated technologies; how would they help us upload consciousness? We can't even map the human brain with complete accuracy.
- wek 7mo agoI've searched and can't find a technical paper on this. Has one been released? This is very problematic.
- lateforwork 7mo agoThese are lab-grown biological neurons. Why are they any more problematic than Nvidia's silicon neurons?
- konaraddi 7mo agoSpeaking for myself : it's a bit creepy and unsettling. Using brain cells is probably inching closer to consciousness than today's silicon is, and consciousness isn't well understood so I'd fear this line of research could eventually lead to the "I have no mouth and I must scream" the other commenter referenced. Many decades from now we might be wondering how much of a human brain needs to be grown in a lab before it's considered unethical.
- lateforwork 7mo agoIs that an issue only because these neurons are biological (still artificial because they are lab grown)? Silicon neurons could also become more powerful and lead to the "I have no mouth and I must scream". In fact, top tech companies are investing 100s of billions of dollars they year to make their silicon neurons more powerful.
- lateforwork 7mo agoCould this be the solution for AGI? Real (albeit lab-grown) human brain cells packaged as "chips"?
- oliveiracwb 7mo agoThis sounded strange to me when I heard about embryonic research on this back in 2015, which even started the legal paving in this regard. Me? I didn't like the idea (then or now), but it would be demagogic to try to fight against it, with so much wrong already existing. The difference between a neuron and a nanostructure is merely the embedded technology. Back in the 50s and 60s, guided rockets used pigeons. Laika in space. Chimpanzees in orbit. Let's accept that we will have bio-drones and Jonny-Mneumonic style upload interfaces.
- falsaberN1 7mo agoHot take here, but I think the version of this experiment that used rat neurons instead of human neurons was more interesting. I can't look for the link right now but there's a video on Youtube, the equipment and techniques are fairly similar. We know a human can play Doom, so it kind of makes sense a portion of a human brain can do so in some fashion. But it's way more interesting when an animal that normally doesn't play Doom can, specially if it's just a portion of its brain. Outside of that, I'm personally not very fond of hardware that can rot or die from malnutrition though. It's fun as an experiment, but as a thing you can actually use I just don't see it. It has a literal limited lifespan, requires more maintenance and imagine trying to debug it ("Turns out it caught some bacteria and it's malfunctioning" kinda scenarios? No thanks.)
- adrianN 7mo agoI imagine the point is not replacing hardware with neurons, but improving our ability to understand in vivo brains.
- llagerlof 7mo agoSo we get the technology to put living brain cells in a virtual simulation, and the first thing we do is put them in hell? Classic humans.
- ReptileMan 7mo agoHell in which you have shotgun and chainsaw and victims is actually heaven.
- grej 7mo agoThey built Warhammer 40k servitors
- saltyoldman 7mo agoWe already replicated Terminator. Why not tackle Robocop next!
- felixhummel 7mo agoThe anime Psycho-Pass comes to mind.
- ReptileMan 7mo agoSo just a couple functioning braincells and playing doom all day. Me in 9th grade.
- juliangamble 7mo agoI am so proud to be an Australian technologist today.
- sfblah 7mo agoBig deal. I had a set of human brain cells playing DOOM in the 1990s.
- hithre 7mo agoSurely it can only be fake. How can it be legal? But seeing so many people from the hacker news community reacting to it as normal or exiting is troubling. This is obviously breaching the limits of ethics.
- jeffybefffy519 7mo agoCortical labs have done this before, its their whole thing…
- 0xTJ 7mo agoIt's a group of cells on a plate? What is there here that would be illegal? This isn't any different than growing some rat intestinal lining cells in a petri dish.
- Zambyte 7mo agoHow do you source living human brain cells? (Not necessarily trying to make a point, I'm genuinely interested)
- volkercraig 7mo agoYou buy them from a supplier. but to answer your question honestly the supplier keeps stock of them by growing them and storing them. The original cells came from donations. You could always extract some cells from a biopsy as well, but these guys likely just bought them from sigma or whatever the Australian lab-supply monopoly is.
- undeveloper 7mo agothere are many "immortal" strains of cells that are mass produced and sold to labs, most notably "HeLa" cells. in this case in particular, "iPSCs" cells are used, sourcing skin cells or blood cells (with informed consent of the patient), and using those differentiated (or "specialized") cells to create pluripotent (or "less specialized") cells that can then be transformed into neurons
- NackerHughes 7mo ago
- 0x1ceb00da 7mo agoHave they tried pluggin in chimp/pig/worm neurons to see how well they perform?
- aw124 7mo agoThe usage of human brain cells for unethical experimentation, except when trying to find cures for diseases, is not only a multiplication of suffering (even on the cellular level) but also creates a new baseline for other labs which will follow this path by example. It's a ridiculous misuse of scientific capacity for evil purposes. IMHO.
- tgv 7mo agoThe saddest part: it's for the money.
- mangatmodi 7mo agoSCI-FI has always featured sentient AI, and now we might be heading toward actually synthesizing brains. This feels dystopian. PS: It's still very cool but also scary.
- XCSme 7mo agoI don't know, it looks like the neurons are triggering quite randomly. Also they didn't fully explain the reward mechanism.
- ionwake 7mo agoI reckon this doesnt work as advertised. Still, horrors beyond our comprehension.
- noobcoder 7mo agoi saw your code, itappears to combination of CNN + PPO on pytoech with a Cortical Labs CL1 chip that contains living neurons Encoder: learns which stimulation patterns tend to improve reward Biological neurons: adapt to the stimulation and generate spike responses that reinforce certain patterns Decoder: interprets those spike patterns and converts them into joystick movements right?
- reliablereason 7mo agoThe amount of people that seam to react negatively to living brain cells doing the computation is unexpected to me. I do understand where it comes from to some extent.. some idea that human cells are special i guess, but it seams very naive to me. We spawn, use and kill far more complex AI agents millions if not billions of times every second in this society. No one gives a shit, as those intelligences are not "real" or whatever.. or they are not "conscious" but conscious is a fictional word without an actual definition. In the end i think it comes down to suffering. No one knows if some internal part in a LLM is suffering just as no one knows if a cell culture with brain cells like this can suffer.
- DangitBobby 7mo agoIt's easy to imagine that scaling up a neural network made up of actual human neurons will quickly achieve something resembling "intelligence" and "qualia" since it's made of the same parts that presumably produce those phenomenon in us. The ethical implications are much harder to deny. Though I am sure it could be attributed to some failure of empathy as you've implied. Perhaps people fear this leads to a future where we have technology that interacts meaningfully with existing wetware (cybernetically enhanced animals, including people).
- shmeeed 7mo agoAh yes, finally another progress update on the Torment Nexus
- meta_gunslinger 7mo agoA lot of posts getting up to arms about experimentation on a handful of human brain cells, but the same people are in favour of murdering fetuses. The cognitive dissonance of this community never ceases to amaze.
- 06867457397658 7mo ago[dead]
- mikemarsh 7mo agoInteresting symbolic angle: as LLMs plateau and are more and more ineffectual at replicating real intelligence, perhaps this is an attempt to keep the sci-fi mythos alive from the other direction: "Computers can't seem to create a mind, but the physical part of a mind creating a computer is basically the same thing, right?"
- tomalbrc 7mo agoCan you use any kind of cell to accomplish this?
- mattschaller 7mo agoGot "eXistenZ" vibes. Anyone watch this? If not, check it out!
- ragle 7mo agoThis reminds me of a nightmare I had in college one semester when I was taking 18 credit hours and consulting part time. I'd been up for days and had been cramming for a computer architecture exam when I basically passed out. I had this very visceral nightmare where I was a compiler and the C code was coming faster than I could translate to ASM. I kept trying to escape but it was like I was locked into the work in this never-ending grinding cycle I couldn't escape from. The dream went on for what felt like hours until I woke up drenched in sweat. Hopefully these neurons aren't satisfying whatever sufficiency threshold delimits consciousness. Approaching some weird ethical territory in any case for sure.
- Anamon 7mo agoThat's the nerdiest dream I ever heard about. I'm a bit jealous I never had one like that (that I remember). How did you compile? Were you sitting at a desk getting piles of printed code?
- trakkstar 7mo agoPosted this here one week ago.
- rustyhancock 7mo agoIn these experiments the neurons don't know they are firing a gun and chasing demons. The task is to produce outputs (movement) to centre an input and then produce an output (shoot). Then the cycle repeats. Typically the input it receives is increasingly regular as it does better. And irregular to mark a failure which the neurons learn to avoid. It has no idea that the data can also be rendered as a Doom game.
- sixothree 7mo agoDoes that mean human brains have neuron "training" feedback?
- rustyhancock 7mo agoThere's a few theories. Most fundamentally come down to the neurones connections and behaviour can be modelled as minimizing prediction error in their stimulus. Dopamine encoding an outcome compared to a baseline expectation is very close to tempeoal difference learning. This is basically what slot machines exploit with their variable reward schemes.
- dqh 7mo agoCortical Labs CTO here. My focus is on the system itself rather than applications, but for what it's worth .. When the neurons didn't get stimulated by the application, performance did not improve. The only explanation our data science people has is that the neurons began to learn and perform the desired (highly abstracted) task of 'playing Doom'. This was not a surprise as we've shown this before with a version of Pong using a different platform. We built the CL1 and the CL API to enable rapid iteration on this sort of work. One benefit to this is that when you have a measurable learning effect, you can measure this before and after exposure to an experimental drug or other molecule. It becomes possible to test the impact on neuron function, not just survival.
- nickpsecurity 7mo agoIt was a great video. You're doing interesting work. I've also seen implementations of realistic neurons, spiking models, etc. In software implementations, what combo of libraries and hardware would equal your 200,000 biological neurons in performance (esp training)? How many GPU's are we talking about? (Note: If you haven't already, it might be helpful to publish a stack like that so people can experiment with encodings or reinforcement methods at no cost to you.)
- dqh 7mo agoThanks! We focus on using real neurons, I'm not aware of a software based equivalent. But users can `pip install cl-sdk` to get started with our API. The SDK is still early but supports playing back a recording of real data so applications can be built with a realistic spike frequency. (We'll be releasing a set of recordings for this)
- nickpsecurity 7mo agoThanks for thr tip. The closest thing to real neurons are called spiking, neural networks. Here's a list of libraries for building them on GPU's: https://github.com/open-neuromorphic/open-neuromorphic https://github.com/open-neuromorphic/open-neuromorphic For academic papers, the phrases they use include "biologically plausible," "Hebbian learning," and "backpropagation free." Searching for those with "neural networks" or "neurons" will turn up cutting-edge techniques.
- Jotalea 7mo agothis reminds me of "i have no mouth and i must scream". it's incredible, but also very eerie.
- BlackieBoi 7mo ago[dead]
- BlackieBoi 7mo ago[dead]
- ndr 7mo agoTIL these are not stem cells directly but rather reprogrammed cells that "comes from an XY donor isolated from neonatal foreskin", which I take to mean baby circumcisions. From their previous work on Pong: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9747182/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9747182/