A San Francisco-based startup claims to be the first to have created a biological computing platform built from living neurons, purposed to accelerate artificial intelligence-based tasks. The Biological Computing Company (TBC) reckons this is a credible pathway to replace, or augment, silicon compute in AI, with support for processes like “computer vision, generative video, and AI infrastructure.” Alongside the bold claims, it is revealed that TBC has secured $25m in funding from its initial seed round and will open a new flagship lab in the city.
The details we have about TBC’s work say that the firm “encodes real-world data (e.g., images, video) into living neurons, then decodes neural activity into richer representations mapped onto state-of-the-art AI models through modular adapters.” This is piped through TBC's Algorithm Discovery platform to bolster the AI compute layer. Thus, in effect, the TBC wetware and software works on the intersection of neuroscience and AI. That seems fitting, as TBC co-founders Alex Ksendsovsky, MD, PhD, and Jon Pomeraniec, MD, MBA, are both neurosurgeon-neuroscientists.
“We're at the ground level of paradigm shift, of what comes next, after language, after silicon," says Pomeraniec. The promise of "building infrastructure to understand and interact with the world in a fundamentally new way" is tantalizing, but the details publicly shared by the company so far are too vague to properly assess. This concern is magnified by the very bold claims of TBC. Moreover, we’ve seen some interviews with the co-founders talk about a ten-to-20-year plan for its neurons in real-time compute integration. So, please stay tuned for a decade or two.
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