To examine how to combine human brain cells with artificial intelligence, a group of researchers has received a $600,000 grant from Australia's Office of National Intelligence. The team has already shown that an 800,000-cell cluster of brain tissue in a Petri dish is capable of playing the game "Pong" in cooperation with the Melbourne-based startup Cortical Labs.
And the researchers aren't shying away from making some bold claims about their work. "This new technology capability in the future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware," said Adeel Razi, team lead and associate profess at Monarch University, in a statement. "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," he added.
According to Razi, the tech could allow a machine intelligence to "learn throughout its lifetime" like human brain cells, allowing it to learn new skills without losing old ones, as well as applying existing knowledge to new tasks. Razi and his colleagues are aiming to grow brain cells in a lab dish called the DishBrain system to investigate this process of "continual lifelong learning."
It's a highly ambitious project that will likely take quite some time to complete. "We will be using this grant to develop better AI machines that replicate the learning capacity of these biological neural networks," Razi said. "This will help us scale up the hardware and methods capacity to the point where they become a viable replacement for in silico computing."