May 19 2023 51 mins
Hon Weng Chong is the CEO and Founder of Cortical Labs, a startup based in Melbourne that has created a "Brain on a chip" technology that ushers in a new paradigm of computing and ability to study the intricacies of the brain and how it functions.
Cortical Labs is combining biological neurons with traditional silicon electronics to create a fundamentally new form of computing, known as Biological Computing. They have shown the ability for this brain on a chip to learn how to play the game Pong in a simulated environment.
This technology can currently help pharmaceutical companies study how new drugs affect the brain to help them get therapeutics and treatments to market, more quickly. In the future, this new form of computing could be used to advance Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as well as develop truly autonomous systems and robotics that can learn from their environment.