A Petri Dish Of Human Brain Neurons Just Learned How To Play Doom

Can a set of lab-grown human neurons fused with silicon play Doom? The answer to that question is yes, and the proof of concept required a massive leap from the Pong-playing demonstration we saw a few years back. In some ways, this experiment mirrors the manner in which AI LLMs have been trained to play Doom. Of course, the use of biotech means that this isn't "AI" in the traditional sense, and fascinatingly, the clump of brain cells actually played better than GPT, though both are still quite bad at the game compared to even a novice Doom player. Still, Cortical Labs has pulled off an impressive scientific feat here—one that shows even the foundational components of a human brain have capability to learn and adapt to stimuli.

This was made possible was through the Cortical Labs CL1 biological computer. The CL1 is a machine we've previously ...