Scientists announce a new 'organoid intelligence' field

Growing mammalian cell spheroids in vitro was one of the highlights for me and my scientific career. So rewarding and interesting, so much more useful than monolayer cell cultures.<p>The article is about neurons, but they are fascinating in cancer research also. You can grow fibroblasts together with cancer cells and they start making something like a real tumor and start exhibiting responses more like in vivo tumors. My favorite way to grow them was just seed the cells in special plates that the cells don&#x27;t want to attach to and they just start attaching to one another and start making a colony of self-organizing cells floating in the media.<p>A good overview here-<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cancerci.biomedcentral.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.1186&#x2F;s12935-021-01853-8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cancerci.biomedcentral.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.1186&#x2F;s12935-0...</a>

&gt;any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^23 integer or floating-point operations.&quot;<p>&gt;using primarily biological sequence data<p>I was wondering about that bit.<p>Those who are straying from gods light the fastest are firmly in the shadows.

Can anybody point me to a better introduction into organoid intelligence? This all looks important and interesting, but this article seems to be all over the place. Turing test and CAPTCHA are not very convincing arguments brains beat AI. Brains store 2,500 (terabytes)? I&#x27;d like to see a source for that. Most brains I meet don&#x27;t seem to know more about the world than a 7B LLM

I wonder if any of the people working in this field write SF that ponders the many thorny ethical knots this involves. There&#x27;s a paragraph late in the article that makes it clear they are aware of them.

What is the limit? I imagine fully sentient super-humans. Somewhere in between the Kings from Foundation and the androids from Bladerunner. Or perhaps both - the Kings from Foundation ruling over Androids from Bladerunner in a world ever so decreasingly &quot;natural&quot;.

Ah sweet, man made horrors beyond our comprehension.

&gt; While ChatGPT can efficiently collect information on the internet, it can’t react to a change in temperature like a cultured cellular system can, he wrote.<p>Is there a qualitative difference between an LLM looking up the temperature on the internet (or getting it from an attached thermometer) and an animal brain receiving it from a thermoreceptor? The latter may be more integrated, but it sounds functionally identical to me.

You know it&#x27;s fund raising because it uses the word &quot;announce&quot; and because it&#x27;s published in a &quot;Frontiers&quot; journal.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240000000000*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;02&#x2F;world&#x2F;brain-computer-organoids-scn&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240000000000*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition....</a>

Well, this will in no way be a means by which an eldritch horror enters into this dimension.

I submitted this recently; a most fascinating talk about.ensembles of multicellular organoids <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39577133">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39577133</a>

Are neurons really more efficient at computing than transistors ?

So in other words... wetware?

Obligatory I have no mouth and I must scream.

Risible storage claims. I know first hand that biological storage is quite lossy with miserable ECC.