A brain ‘living in the Matrix’ – scientists unveil $600,000 plan to merge MORE human brain cells with AI funded by Australian intelligence agency

A team of Australian scientists collaborating in academia and the private sector has just received a three-year grant to weaponize their work to grow brain cell cultures capable of communicating with machines.

Over the past two years, the team has already managed to teach a brain cell culture of about 800,000 neurons how to successfully play the 1970s video game Pong from the petri dish.

The $600,000 grant was awarded by the Australian government’s military and intelligence services and will be administered by the Australian Research Council.

“The beautiful and groundbreaking aspect of this work rests on equipping the neurons with sensations: the feedback,” as one of the Pong project co-investigators, theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston, put it last October.

“And crucially,” Professor Friston added, brain culture has been given, “the ability to respond to their world.”

About two years ago, the Australian team that won the $600,000 grant had already managed to teach a brain cell culture of about 800,000 neurons how to successfully play the 1970s video game Pong. DishBrain came up with the game faster than AI in just five minutes

“Remarkably, the cultures learned how to make their world more predictable by acting on it,” Friston said in a press statement.

‘This is remarkable because you can’t teach this kind of self-organization; simply because — unlike a pet — these mini-brains have no sense of reward and punishment,” he explained.

The new project advancing this technology will be led by psychologist Adeel Razi at Monash University in Australia, where Razi is also head of the school. Computational neuroscience laboratory.

The research was conducted in collaboration with a Melbourne, Australia-based start-up Cortical Laboratoriesas well as University College London where Friston is based.

Through the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants (NISDRG) program, the Australian Office of National Intelligence and the Australian Department of Defense’s National Security Science and Technology Center award up to $18 million in high-tech grants each year.

In particular, the $600,000 AUD grant awarded to these researchers is at the top of those awardswhich range from $400,000 to $600,000 per grant.

The team’s proof-of-concept success in teaching their brain cell culture to play Pong was first made public in December 2021, a breakthrough that came faster than any computer-based AI.

“The amazing thing is how fast it learns,” said Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs chief scientific officer. New scientist that month, ‘in five minutes, in real time’.

The fastest time an all-silicon-based computer AI could handle was 90 minutes to master playing Pong.

“That’s really amazing what biology can do,” Kagan said.

Dubbed ‘DishBrain’, the system consists of brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both stimulate the cells

The Monash University and Cortical Labs researchers have dubbed their brain culture of cortical neurons growing on top of an array of computer-coupled microelectrodes “DishBrain.”

As Kagan put it, “We think it’s fair to call them cyborg brains.”

From the virtual world where Pong is played, the feeds from the electrodes help the minibrain learn how to operate the virtual paddle.

While playing Pong, activity patterns in the neurons are controlled by the minibrain as the paddle moves left or right.

“We often call them alive in the Matrix,” Kagan said. “When they’re in the game, they think they’re the paddle.”

With their new research funding, it seems Razi’s statements via Monash Universitythe group hopes to revolutionize not just computers, but entire segments of the digital economy by advancing DishBrain.

“Results from such research would have significant implications in multiple areas such as, but not limited to, planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage,” said Razi.

Razi, speaking as project lead, believed that Australia’s national security sector preferred their brain cell-computer interface project because they see its potential in many areas where traditional AI is failing or too slow to progress.

Self-driving vehicles, fully autonomous drones and more symbiotic wearable devices “require a new type of machine intelligence that can learn throughout its life,” Razi said.

“These new technological capabilities in the future may eventually exceed the performance of existing purely silicon-based hardware,” he said.