A Team Out of Australia Wins Grant to Merge AI With Human Brain Cells

An Australian team out of Monash University and Cortical Labs has won a grant to merge AI with human brain cells. The grant, valued at $600,000, was given by Australia’s Office of Intelligence. According to a report by The Guardian, this is the same team that created DishBrain; brain cells capable of playing pong.

According to Associate Professor Adeel Razi, from the university’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, the team won the grant because there was a need for a new kind of machine intelligence. In particular, one that could “learn throughout its lifetime.“.

When speaking about how it works, Professor Razi described how hundreds of thousands of live, lab-grown brain cells learn how to do different tasks. Most noticeable, tasks like playing the classic game Pong. During this, a multi-electrode array uses electrical activity to give the cells feedback about when the “paddle” is hitting the “ball”. In a way a form of reinforcement learning.

Of the entire process, Professor Razi stated, the study “merges the fields of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to create programmable biological computing platforms”. They went on to write an article in Neuron, a science magazine. In it, they wrote about how synthetic biological intelligence was  “previously confined to the realm of science fiction” and could be within reach.

If proven to be successful and scalable, Professor Razi said this kind of union could help improve current machine learning technology. Especially the tech that is being used for automated vehicles, drones, and AI-powered robotics.  He said, “This new technology capability in the future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware.”.

Professor Razi’s optimism for how far synthetic biological intelligence could go, he went on to state, “The outcomes of such research would have significant implications across multiple fields such as – but not limited to – planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces, and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage.”.

The potential for this technology is vast, as human brains are extremely efferent, and are well-equipped at learning for a lifetime. While on the other hand, AI can suffer from what’s called “catastrophic forgetting“. With the grant, Razi and the team are planning “to develop better AI machines that replicate the learning capacity of these biological neural networks,…This will help us scale up the hardware and methods capacity to the point where they become a viable replacement for in-silico computing [using simulations].”.