You Say "AI," I Hear "Organoid"

I must admit, ever since I learned about, and wrote about (OI May Be the New AI), “organoid intelligence” over three years ago, I’ve been looking to do a follow-up. I mean, sure, AI is in a very exciting stage, but that stage no longer seems like the future; it seems more like the present, with implementation issues. It’s data centers, hacking, impacts on jobs, open weight versus closed, and so on.  It’s market share, IPOs, and AI’s role in driving the stock market. People should certainly pay attention to it, but AI is not quite the open field that it was just a few years ago.

AI better get ready for organoid intelligence. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Organoids, on the other hand, are not quite here yet. They may – or may not – be the future of AI, among other things. I always like to look ahead to the next thing more than the at-hand, so when I saw some cool developments with organoids, I didn’t want to miss my chance.

Making some news last week, researchers at Harvard reported that they’d kept lab grown human brain organoids alive for over five years, three times the previous record. Not only that, but the organoids seem to “retain a memory of the time spent in vitro,” recording the passage of time, as it were.

“We didn’t know how far the development and maturation of human brain tissue could occur outside the context of the normal brain inside the head,” said Paola Arlotta, Golub Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and senior author of the new paper. “This work showed that it’s actually possible to not just have these organoids survive in culture, but also continue to change, develop, and mature over stretches of time that had never been reached before.”

The team observed the organoid cells over the years, and found that they “faithfully modeled” the ways that human brain cells develop, including DNA methylation, a process in which genes are turned on and off during development, and which serve as a form of “brain clock.” When older and younger organoid cells were combined in a single organoid, the older cells stuck to the developmental stage they had been at, which researchers concluded meant they “recorded the passage of time and retain a memory of the developmental steps already performed.”

“We were a little bit shocked by the results,” Professor Arlotta said. “I like to call this a ‘time warp’ of development — they skip ahead.”

It’s obviously hard, and often unethical, to study actual human brain cells, so the researchers believe the organoids offer opportunities for more insights into brain development, as well as for testing drugs or predicting disease progression.

OK, you might say, that’s all very interesting and some great lab work, but it’s hardly AI, now is it?

Try this: last week The Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), DayOne, a Singapore-headquartered global data centre developer and operator, and Cortical Labs, a Melbourne-based biological computing startup, announced they were partnering to form a Biological Data Center Prototype. The Center uses Cortical Labs' CL1 biological computing system to offer “practical, sustainability-aligned alternative to conventional silicon infrastructure in Singapore through wetware-based computing.”

Cortical Labs claims that its CL1 system is “the first independently operated biologically integrated server rack in the world.” It uses living neurons ground from stem cells and pairs them with silicon hardware tom process information, but much more efficiently than purely silicon-based processes, making it what is company says is a “more advanced and sustainable form of AI.”

“This partnership marks a genuine shift in how we think about computing and its broader scientific potential,” said Professor Rickie Patani, Professor of Neuroscience at NUS Medicine. “By growing living human neurons from stem cells and pairing them with rigorous engineering, we’re not only building a more efficient alternative to silicon; we’re creating a platform that can help us understand learning and adaptation at their biological source. That dual promise is what makes this collaboration sustainable and scientifically generative. It gives us a real route to accelerate drug discovery and neurological disease research, turning laboratory insight into real-world impact far faster than we could before.”

Hon Weng Chong, founder and CEO of Cortical Labs, added: "The establishment of this prototype shifts the conversation from research to commercial application. Biological computing supplements AI in areas where data is sparse, learning from far less and adapting as conditions change. Our aim is to uncover the use cases where that advantage matters most, in areas such as drug discovery, humanoid robotics, cybersecurity and fraud detection."

Now, that sounds more like AI, right?

Earlier this summer researchers met in Silicon Valley to discuss the convergence of AI and organoids. “Using AI and human brain organoids together to understand how our brains actually work will give us a much deeper understanding of ourselves,” said David Haussler, Scientific Director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. “And I want us to really engage with the question of what happens if we succeed.”

The session focused largely on the work done by the Braingeneers, an interdisciplinary research group at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, UCSF, UCSB, Stanford, and Washington University (St. Louis). For example, the Braingeneers showed an organoid that was learning to play a virtual game, then had a volunteer from the audience try the same, to little success. “This is just to demonstrate that it is actually a very hard task,” Ash Robbins, a postdoctoral scholar with the Braingeneers who was running the demonstration, said. “There is no way the organoids are doing it by accident.” 

Credit: Braingeneers

The Braingeneers ultimately want to create a platform capable of conducting hundreds and soon thousands of organoid experiments in parallel over months. Mr. Robbins has developed BrainDance, an open-source software system that allows other researchers to conduct neural simulation learning experiments for organoids. “This software makes running really complicated experiments extremely easy. “Usually labs spend years building up all of this kind of software themselves,” he said. “Now, any biologist could download our software very easily and run these types of experiments in just minutes.” The Braingeneers say they are focused on brain research and the treatment of neurological diseases, not AI, but their work could facilitate others’ work in that area.

As Professor Haussler said: “This is the beginning of something very big.”

Indeed.

So while much of the world is focused on more and faster chips, crammed with more and more data, I’m going to pay attention to what happens when organoids keep getting smarter.