base in Melbourne. The CTO of the world’s largest cloud provider, Werner Vogels, was intrigued by the four-year-old startup’s sci-fi innovation: A living human brain cell-powered computer chip, dubbed DishBrain, that has learned to play Atari’s“Werner told us the biggest cost out of any data center or cloud provider is the energy that they pay for running the equipment and cooling the system,” recalls Chong, cofounder and CEO of Cortical Labs.
In April, Cortical Labs netted $10 million in a funding round led by Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm of Hong Kong’s richest person. Joining the round was existing investor Blackbird Ventures, one of Australia’s largest venture capital funds, as well as In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, among others.
Cortical Labs has already gone further than most in trying to commercialize biological computers. A rare example is Koniku, a California-based company that combines living cells with computer chips to create sensors mimicking sniffer dogs’ ability to detect explosives and drugs. It has partnered with European aircraft maker Airbus to deploy its devices for aviation security.
“It’s very difficult at Cortical Labs because not only do we have to be the Nvidia to make the hardware, but also be the OpenAI to write the software,” says Chong. “On top of that, we have to prove that this biological computer can still extend further, that we can make it do more tasks than just playingCortical Labs’ biological computer is “a body in a box,” Chong jokes. The human brain cells are created by engineering stem cells from adults’ skin or blood.
Training GPT-3, the brain behind OpenAI’s viral chatbot, for example, consumed 1.287 gigawatt-hours of electricity, according to a 2021. This equals to electricity consumed by around 120 homes in the U.S. in 2021. The human brain, on the other hand, is said to run on about 20 watts, or the energy enough to power an LED light bulb.
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