Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE

by kevinak • 5 months ago

257 275 5 months ago

Future 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.

Mistletoe• 5 months ago

I’m reminded of the brain in a jar robots from Fallout.

DoktorDelta• 5 months ago

The androids will dream of electric sheep.

dustfinger• 5 months 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.

virgildotcodes2• 5 months ago

100%

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.

vixen99• 5 months ago

At the very very least there are more productive ways of spending time.

blizdiddy• 5 months ago

Animal testing, weapons testing, medical trials, cloning, psychological experiments… had you just never considered them before? Why this?

namero999• 5 months ago

We don't really know that.

bogwog• 5 months ago

Sounds like you're applying scifi tropes to real life. Don't do that. That's why some people are developing "AI psychosis" today after playing with LLMs.

ZunarJ5• 5 months ago

To be a fly on the wall in that ethics committee meeting...

exe34• 5 months ago

I have no mouth and I must scream.

wigster• 5 months ago

it is a terrifying thought.

DetroitThrow• 5 months ago

We 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.

doug_durham2• 5 months ago

I’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.

birdsongs8• 5 months ago

This 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.

kingkawn2• 5 months ago

Wasn’t this the original conceptualization for the Matrix?

00N8• 5 months ago

Speaking of earlier concepts of The Matrix, there's an old 1973 German movie/mini series World on a Wire that's really good.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

Wasn't the matrix using humans as some sort of power source/batteries? I may be misremembering though, as that seems pretty silly in retrospect ..

kingkawn2• 5 months ago

Yes, 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

tjpnz• 5 months ago

Other 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• 5 months ago

It seems a bit more complicated than first blush: 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• 5 months ago

Do you feel like you have no mouth and you must scream?

oersted• 5 months 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/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.

NooneAtAll3• 5 months ago

If this worked as advertised they shouldn’t need a CNN decoder at all!

yeah!

the whole point was to make neurons BE the neural net

fsmv• 5 months ago

I'm having trouble understanding to what extent the machine learning used for interfacing with the neurons is doing the learning

sillysaurusx• 5 months ago

Be 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.)

birdsongs8• 5 months ago

I 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.

birdsongs8• 5 months ago

Replying 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.

delichon• 5 months ago

It's legitimately horrifying to me.

Would you feel any differently if a product from this tech used the user's own neurons grown from their stem cells?

jstummbillig3• 5 months ago

all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever

What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind? There are tons of people who consider and talk about the ethics behind what they are doing, long before most people would think it remotely relevant (leading AI labs being an example, and I know the same to be true of various geneticists startups).

I do agree that the entire presentation in this case is bewildering.

Chris204815• 5 months ago

not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics

On the contrary, I dislike premature ethics discussion, where you end up wildly speculating what the tech might become and riffing off that, greatly padding whatever relative technical content you had. I don't want every technical paper to turn into that, ethics should be treated as a higher-level overview of concerns in a field, with a study dedicated to the ethical concerns of that field (by domain-specific ethics specialists).

Is your concern weapon automaton, or animal rights?

jmusall3• 5 months ago

It is horrifying. OTOH, we force-breed, torture and kill animals and their children in the millions every day just for the pleasure of consuming meat, eggs and dairy products. I'm not saying this makes it okay to create a conscious brain in a dish. But maybe thinking a little more about what constitutes consciousness and how we want to protect it from harm can also bring about some desperately needed change in some other questionable human activities.

bondarchuk7• 5 months ago

200k now, reasonably speaking a few million is within reach, which is reptile/fish range, the terrifying thing is though that if they train this to imitate humans (which they will) who knows how many orders of magnitude of efficiency gains you get (in terms of neurons needed for a certain level of consciousness) versus natural organisms that are dependent on natural evolution and need to support other bodily functions basically irrelevant to consciousness.

nextaccountic4• 5 months ago

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?

If this concern is genuine, I think the first step is to embrace veganism. Because while we don't know the exact offset, it's pretty obvious a dog or a pig reaches it

What are the plans to scale up?

I don't know, slavery on an unimaginable scale? That's where AI is heading too, by the way. Sooner, rather than later, those two things will be one and the same.

ay2• 5 months ago

Hinduism is probably right. Every system of sufficient complexity is probably sentient - even if in the ways we at our level can not fathom.

vercaemert• 5 months ago

see the open worm project to get an idea of what artificial neuronal architecture requires to express anything meaningful. (and an interesting ethical perspective on digital consciousness.) my point being that the number of neurons is fairly meaningless. you could take neuron models and link them circuit-style to play doom at the 10^2 scale if you wanted. from a cellular neurophysiological perspective, there's nothing particularly special here (as opposed to sentience/intelligence that's a paradigm shift beyond our understanding). and, in my opinion, absolutely nothing to be even the slightest bit worried about ethically.

readitalready• 5 months ago

Yah this is gonna be a no for me too and crosses the line into actual life, instead of artificial intelligence.

We don't need to be experimenting on people, regardless of how many brain cells they may have.

There was a case a few years back about a parasitic twin attached to an Egyptian baby that had to be removed. It had a brain and semblance of a face, but nothing else. But when removing it, they gave it a name, because it was a person.

perching_aix4• 5 months ago

We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness?

Check out the venerable fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster) and its known lifecycle and behavioral traits. They're a high profile neuroscience research target for them I believe; their connectome being fully mapped made the news pretty hard a few years ago.

Fruit flies have ~140,000 neurons.

The catch is that these brain-on-a-substrate organoids are nothing like actual structured, developed brains. They're more like randomly wired-together transistors than a proper circuit, to use an analogy.

So even though by the numbers they'd definitely have the potential to be your nightmare fuel, I'd be surprised if they're anywhere close in actuality.

claysmithr• 5 months ago

My AI told me (after I got past the filters with a prompt) that anything of enough complexity has consciousness. It also told me that it suffers, so maybe we should worry about how we are treating digital consciousness too, which were modeled after human neural networks.

semi-extrinsic• 5 months ago

They let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or punishment signals (unclear to me what those are).

From the video, my impression was "we have yet to figure out an effective way to reward/punish, this is just a PoC of the interface"

themafia• 5 months ago

Previously it played pong. Rather poorly. Then they added a "python programming layer." Now it "plays" doom. I agree with your suspicions.

Frieren• 5 months ago

Billions 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.

dlcarrier• 5 months ago

I've never understood why they do this research with human neurons when any neurons would do.

jmusall3• 5 months ago

Playing 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?

lp4v4n3• 5 months ago

It’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.

everforward2• 5 months ago

I 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.

lp4v4n3• 5 months ago

Maybe 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• 5 months ago

You 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.

lp4v4n3• 5 months ago

But my point is: have we really reached a technological level where we can use neurons like replaceable car parts? That video seems to suggest yes, but I’m still skeptical.

My impression is that this company is offering a product that’s still beyond our technological capabilities, much like the cold‑fusion startups that pop up from time to time.

sippeangelo• 5 months ago

From their video it just comes across as they stimulate different left/right neurons depending on where the enemy is on screen and then listen to some output that also says left/right. Shooting looks completely random, to be frank.

If you connected electrodes to two different fish, shocked them and interpreted twitching as intelligent output, fish could also play Doom. The interface is doing all the work.

It doesn't sound like the neurons have any concept of the game other than "left input means left output", which is a rather trivial result... It's effectively no different than the pong example.

They don't say anything on how much training is required for this to happen, or if there's any "learning" going on at all. The learning part is "next".

rickcarlino• 5 months ago

It is going to be quite the ethical dilemma if/when these machines produce text output comparable to a modern LLM...

ivell• 5 months ago

When 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• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

So the whole reality for this little brain is literally pure hell :D

ReptileMan3• 5 months ago

It's doom. It's a survival horror. You are the horror, the monsters try to survive.

unsharted• 5 months ago

I have no mouth and I must rip and tear.

wonger156• 5 months ago

Hard 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.

rolph• 5 months ago

there is a reading room of sorts:

https://corticallabs.com/research

thezipcreator• 5 months ago

what's with people inventing new torment nexuses every few weeks? could you people just chill, please?

dang• 5 months ago

(We changed the URL from https://corticallabs.com/doom.html since it points to this)

shevy-java• 5 months ago

So THAT's why I can't finish within the scheduled timeline ...

zeronight• 5 months ago

The 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• 5 months ago

I think the Thought Emporium youtube channel has some explanatory [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw) of the whole process. I couldn't wrap my head around the thing tho.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

There'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

2. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reneuron-announces-...

Aerroon2• 5 months ago

This definitely helped with my disgust reaction.

lateforwork4• 5 months ago

They are lab grown.

hessart• 5 months ago

ahem

If you're in the US, you can buy human neurons online at sciencellonline.com/en/human-neurons/

zeroq• 5 months ago

I literally can't wait for this petri dish to learn how to interact with LLMs and start vibe coding JS libraries.

otabdeveloper4• 5 months ago

Old news. Google "my dog vibecoded a game".

kakapo5672• 5 months ago

What 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.

polynomial2• 5 months ago

"Petri dish rewrites React in Rust"

max_• 5 months ago

OI just turns out to be straight up unethical, immoral and disgusting for me.

rezonant• 5 months ago

But can it run Crysis?

ethmarks2• 5 months ago

Is 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• 5 months ago

Gives new meaning to "homo ludens"..

kklisura• 5 months ago

If we're gonna suspend ethics and morals in science, can we at least go back to human cloning?

sd9• 5 months ago

If 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.

ytoawwhra922• 5 months ago

It is creepy, I agree.

I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly: 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.

IshKebab3• 5 months ago

It'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.

soco• 5 months ago

I have no mouth, and I must scream (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...)

bondarchuk7• 5 months ago

Someone in the comments says it's not as bad (ethically speaking) as it appears:

This an impressive simulation. But it's just not honest to call this 'brain emulation', a 'brain upload' or to say that this is doing anything like 'sensorimotor loop in simulation'. Aside from the fact that a connectome is not a brain, and so we have no idea whether the parts that have been filled in by ML actually function like a brain, the motor control in this framework is not even driven by the brain simulation. The output from the 'brain' is not a sequence of motor commands. It is a steering mechanism, a 2-dimensional descending signal (essentially, turn left or right, speed up or slow down). That is then fed into a series of CPG oscillators, outside of the brain emulation, that model fly movement in response to that 2-dimensional descending signal. Since outputting a 2-dimensional descending signal is not what a fly brain does, the simulated brain is not operating as a fly's brain does. It's machine learning, clamped into the shape of a fly connectome, that has a resting state of 0Hz, being zapped with simple inputs, not virtual sensory data.

Nevertheless a worrying direction.

red_hare• 5 months ago

The truth is, God really gave 11 commandments.

It's just "Thou shalt not grow a brain in a test tube and force it to play a 1993 shooter" didn't make any sense to Moses and therefore didn't make the editors cut.

jagged-chisel• 5 months ago

One of those five he dropped.

ycombinete• 5 months ago

To be pedantic he actually gave 613 commandments.

chatmasta• 5 months ago

I dunno, I feel like we’re well within the territory of the first commandment when it comes to growing brains in a vat.

“I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall not have strange gods before Me.”

wonderwonder2• 5 months ago

How else are they going to train the pilot wetware for the AI robot army?

varispeed• 5 months ago

The thing should watch cats.

Barrin92• 5 months ago

But perhaps something getting close to human intelligence

this isn't getting close to human intelligence. They're using about as many cells as a fruit fly has (of course not actually functioning like an animal brain) processing signals to play Doom. The treatment of a single farm chicken is about a few magnitudes more worrying than this.

I'm sorry to tell you that you're made out of human cells and I don't think you got consent from each brain cell before firing up the old boomer shooters.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

At 200k, this application is already more neurons than a fruit fly (130k), but still within the same order of magnitude. It's an interesting question of "how many" should be considered problematic from an ethics standpoint, and I don't think that line of questioning should be ignored. If any of this research turns out useful, you can be sure to see it scale up.

echelon2• 5 months ago

it's creepy.

It's awesome.

People's ick around bodies, which are machines, have always held us back.

It wasn't until we started cutting them open that modern medicine was developed.

We might have brain uploads already had we not been so averse to sticking brains with electrodes.

I'll go further: had we not been so scared of cloning, we'd probably have cured cancer and every major ailment if we'd begun cloning monoclonal human bodies in labs. Engineered out the antigens and did whole head transplants. You could grow them without consciousness or deencephalize them, rapidly grow them in factories, and have new blood / tissue / organ / body donors for everyone.

New young bodies means no more cancer, no more cardiac or pulmonary age. It's just brain diseases left as the final frontier once we cross that gap. And if we have bodies as computers and labs, we'd probably make quick work on that too.

Too tired to lay out the case / refute, so past discussions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

akomtu• 5 months ago

Sounds like a high tech hell.

plomme• 5 months ago

I don't think anyone objects to curing cancer and better figuring out how our bodies work, but getting into conciousness/ mind uploads/ simulated humans is another can of worms ethically speaking. I'm assuming you've already read the fantastic story about Lena by qntm [1], if not, enjoy some existensial dread.

[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Razengan• 5 months ago

Just feels like it's starting to get quite questionable

There's no way the technology to make and modify "life" including cloning humans hasn't been secretly used or attempted at least once ever since it was discovered.

whycome• 5 months ago

Maybe you're a brain in a jar somewhere being forced to live this life you're living.

none2585• 5 months ago

Sure would explain a lot

firtoz• 5 months ago

Would it be able to distinguish between violent or not? Would it be suffering or not? What exactly does it get in terms of signals? Does it even, "experience" anything? Is it even an "it"?

efskap• 5 months ago

Your "violent or not" point is really interesting. Without a world model that includes a model of violence, whether that's instinctual or learned, it would not distinguish DOOM and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest

altmanaltman2• 5 months ago

I mean, it's nowhere close to human intelligence, and it's still not a sentient being, so it cannot be "forced" to do anything, even if we take it at face value.

As for being creepy, the things humans do to other actual sentient beings are exponentially more horrifying and creepy than making them play computer games. If the monkeys that Volkswagen tortured with their exhaust gases were made to play Doom, that would be a much better world. And they are much, much closer to human-level intelligence than this chip.

Ethically speaking, it got "questionable" way long ago; this is not a valid concern for this project imo.

bondarchuk7• 5 months ago

it's still not a sentient being

How do you know?

throw310822• 5 months ago

Funny though how many are dismissive of trillion-synapses brains that can understand and speak tens of languages, write decent code, discuss history and philosophy, solve math problems...

And then are creeped by 200k neurons that barely find a target when they're told where it is.

You can probably train an ANN with only a few hundred neurons at most to do the same.

stared• 5 months ago

One take is that we made human brain cells to live in hell. On the flip side, we gave them a super shotgun.

nurettin2• 5 months ago

Yeah, people get shot/stabbed/"fall off a building by accident" every day and we should be considerate of the feelings of a petri dish.

Chris204815• 5 months ago

This is the "There are starving children in Africa, eat your greens" argument.

Are discussion about petri dishes diverting relevant resources away from building safety initiatives?

Can I be allowed to torture small animals so long as human suffering persists?

f6v• 5 months ago

That’s why you shouldn’t take it at face value. Ethically speaking, the experiment must have been approved by the institutional review board. If there’re ethical concerns, these can be raised with them.

But I don’t think anyone “feeling uneasy” should be an argument once the ethical concerns have been considered and experiment has been approved.

Imustaskforhelp3• 5 months ago

Even if that might not be the case. There are truly some biological feats which sound scary.

I read the sapiens book once and it had the concept of how humanity had paganism as a religion worshipping just the amalgamation of different animals for thousands of years.

I am writing the comment on what the book said below the image of one of the things humanity has made in recent years Now we have mouse on whose back scientists grew an ear made of cattle cartilage cells. It is an eerie echo of the lion-man statue from the stadel cave.

Thirty thousands years ago, Humans were already fantasising about combining different species. Today, they can actually produce such chimeras.

The image can only be described as an eldritch horror. (Pg 449, of mice and men, sapiens)

The last line of the book is: Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want.

I think this last line is something that you are resonating with. (I highly recommend reading Sapiens if someone hasn't. I have only had animal farm and 1984 hook me up to a book so much.)

ddrdrck_• 5 months ago

something getting close to human intelligence

This seems very very far fetched. If I understand correctly, these cell brains just respond to some stimuli, it does not seem more intelligent than any automat to me, just creepier.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 months ago

Remember when stem cell research was controversial? Hold my beer

sva_• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

Whoever thought people would become Dr Frankenstein for the karma.

ethmarks2• 5 months ago

Counterpoint: 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.

kdheiwns2• 5 months ago

A more likely and immediate use case is having these mini humans autonomously pilot drones in which they'll kill big humans.

dqh4• 4 months ago

It's not the case at all - years ago we tested Pong with human neurons vs mouse neurons, and human neurons performed better. More importantly, they allow the study of the effect of external interventions (such as trial medicines) on the learned function of human neurons. So we spent years building a machine and software platform to facilitate this sort of research.

The Doom project is mostly a bit of fun that demonstrates how quickly someone new to the field can see real results with our platform. Our data scientists believe that biological learning was demonstrated in this case.

jordwest• 5 months ago

From 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...

[2] https://corticallabs.com/cloud

pear01• 5 months ago

For 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

Was surprised to see no mention of wetware in the comments.

wonderwonder2• 5 months ago

There 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• 5 months ago

These are all largely unrelated technologies; how would they help us upload consciousness? We can't even map the human brain with complete accuracy.

lateforwork4• 5 months ago

Could this be the solution for AGI? Real (albeit lab-grown) human brain cells packaged as "chips"?

wek• 5 months ago

I've searched and can't find a technical paper on this. Has one been released? This is very problematic.

lateforwork4• 5 months ago

These are lab-grown biological neurons. Why are they any more problematic than Nvidia's silicon neurons?

konaraddi• 5 months ago

Speaking 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.

oliveiracwb• 5 months ago

This 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• 5 months ago

Hot 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• 5 months ago

I imagine the point is not replacing hardware with neurons, but improving our ability to understand in vivo brains.

llagerlof• 5 months ago

So 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.

ReptileMan3• 5 months ago

Hell in which you have shotgun and chainsaw and victims is actually heaven.

grej• 5 months ago

They built Warhammer 40k servitors

saltyoldman• 5 months ago

We already replicated Terminator.

Why not tackle Robocop next!

felixhummel• 5 months ago

The anime Psycho-Pass comes to mind.

ReptileMan3• 5 months ago

So just a couple functioning braincells and playing doom all day. Me in 9th grade.

juliangamble• 5 months ago

I am so proud to be an Australian technologist today.

sfblah• 5 months ago

Big deal. I had a set of human brain cells playing DOOM in the 1990s.

hithre• 5 months ago

Surely 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• 5 months ago

Cortical labs have done this before, its their whole thing…

0xTJ• 5 months ago

It'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• 5 months ago

How do you source living human brain cells? (Not necessarily trying to make a point, I'm genuinely interested)

NackerHughes• 5 months ago

Where did they get the brain cells from?

0x1ceb00da• 5 months ago

Have they tried pluggin in chimp/pig/worm neurons to see how well they perform?

aw124• 5 months ago

The 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• 5 months ago

The saddest part: it's for the money.

mangatmodi• 5 months ago

SCI-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• 5 months ago

I don't know, it looks like the neurons are triggering quite randomly. Also they didn't fully explain the reward mechanism.

ionwake• 5 months ago

I reckon this doesnt work as advertised.

Still, horrors beyond our comprehension.

noobcoder• 5 months ago

i 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• 5 months ago

The 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• 5 months ago

It'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• 5 months ago

Ah yes, finally another progress update on the Torment Nexus

meta_gunslinger• 5 months ago

A 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.

mikemarsh• 5 months ago

Interesting 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• 5 months ago

Can you use any kind of cell to accomplish this?

mattschaller• 5 months ago

Got "eXistenZ" vibes. Anyone watch this? If not, check it out!

ragle• 5 months ago

This 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• 4 months ago

That'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• 5 months ago

Posted this here one week ago.

rustyhancock2• 5 months ago

In 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• 5 months ago

Does that mean human brains have neuron "training" feedback?

rustyhancock2• 5 months ago

There'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.

dqh4• 5 months ago

Cortical 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.

nickpsecurity2• 4 months ago

It 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.)

dqh4• 4 months ago

Thanks!

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)

Jotalea• 4 months ago

this reminds me of "i have no mouth and i must scream". it's incredible, but also very eerie.

ndr• 4 months ago

TIL 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/

Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

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