Arr, those scurvy Australian DishBrain scallywags be gettin' o'er $400K booty to mix AI with human noggin matter!
2023-07-21
Arrr, ye scurvy dogs! In southern Australia, those clever mateys be given a shiny treasure worth o'er $403,000 to tinker with mixin' human noggin cells and the fancy contraption known as artificial intelligence. Aye, the future be lookin' mighty peculiar, indeed!
A team of researchers in Australia has received federal funding of over $403,000 to merge human brain cells with artificial intelligence. Melbourne's Monash University, together with start-up Cortical Labs, is leading the research into growing human brain cells on silicon chips. The project involves teaching around 800,000 brain cells living in a dish to perform goal-directed tasks. Last year, the cells gained international attention for their ability to play the game Pong. The researchers believe that this new technology could eventually surpass the performance of current silicon-based hardware. They predict significant implications across fields such as planning, robotics, automation, brain-machine interfaces, and drug discovery. The funding was granted because the new generation of machine learning applications will require a new type of machine intelligence that can learn throughout its lifetime. Current AI technology cannot acquire new skills without compromising old ones and suffers from "catastrophic forgetting." Brains, on the other hand, excel at continual lifelong learning. The researchers aim to understand the biological mechanisms underlying lifelong learning by growing human brain cells in a laboratory dish called the DishBrain system. The grant will be used to develop AI machines that replicate the learning capacity of these biological neural networks. The goal is to scale up the hardware and methods capacity to the point where they become a viable replacement for in silico computing, which refers to computer-based experimentation.