This Week in Startups
00:12:43 · Hon Weng Chong, Alex Wilhelm
[00:12:43] S3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So quite a lot of the first few attempts weren't really successful. But fortunately, these neurons are very malleable and they're very dynamic and they self organize. And we realized that if we were trying to tweak the system while they were learning, you would end up with these very weird so called attractive dynamics where... Because, you know, what... It's like how to describe it when when you're trying to find somebody in a shopping mall, but you... The other person's also looking for you and you're looking for them, and so you almost never meet because they're always moving around in that same pattern. That's what we were doing. So what we ended up doing was we said, wait. We're not gonna change some parameters. We're just gonna leave it fixed. But we are going to, you know, flash them with different, like, signals and so forth. Maybe, hopefully, that way they won't be like... We wouldn't be wandering around trying to find it... Find each other. [00:13:35] S1: So so, Han, this is actually when I I fell in love with what Corticol was doing because according to at least NPR's reporting of this, you guys provided kind of a positive and negative response electrically to the neurons that were interacting with the chip, and you gave a burst of, I guess, unfortunate white noise to the Mhmm. Device if it was the wrong action and then a a positive organized burst of electrical activity if it got it right. So essentially, you very politely shocked it if it did bad pong, and you rewarded it if it did good pong?
00:13:35 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:13:35] S1: So so, Han, this is actually when I I fell in love with what Corticol was doing because according to at least NPR's reporting of this, you guys provided kind of a positive and negative response electrically to the neurons that were interacting with the chip, and you gave a burst of, I guess, unfortunate white noise to the Mhmm. Device if it was the wrong action and then a a positive organized burst of electrical activity if it got it right. So essentially, you very politely shocked it if it did bad pong, and you rewarded it if it did good pong? [00:14:07] S3: Kind of. I mean, I wouldn't say... It's not really a, you know, a a reward or a shock kind of thing. Because at the end of day, we're still giving them electrical signal. It's just the structure of it. And this was actually driven by us coming across a theory developed by a neuroscientist based in UCL in London by the name of Carl Friston, which is actually really interesting, really fascinating, the free energy principle. The free energy principle kind of posits is that the brain or all biologically intelligent systems are actually generative models. What we do in was now believed is happening in our brains is that we're not reactive machines, we're actually predictive machines. And so we're actually generating hypotheses about the world that is external to the brain in the brain as simulations. And then we're using the senses that we receive and the ability to affect the world as mini experiments to prove and disprove the hypotheses that are generated by the brain.
00:14:07 · Hon Weng Chong, Alex Wilhelm
[00:14:07] S3: Kind of. I mean, I wouldn't say... It's not really a, you know, a a reward or a shock kind of thing. Because at the end of day, we're still giving them electrical signal. It's just the structure of it. And this was actually driven by us coming across a theory developed by a neuroscientist based in UCL in London by the name of Carl Friston, which is actually really interesting, really fascinating, the free energy principle. The free energy principle kind of posits is that the brain or all biologically intelligent systems are actually generative models. What we do in was now believed is happening in our brains is that we're not reactive machines, we're actually predictive machines. And so we're actually generating hypotheses about the world that is external to the brain in the brain as simulations. And then we're using the senses that we receive and the ability to affect the world as mini experiments to prove and disprove the hypotheses that are generated by the brain. [00:15:18] S1: Okay. So you guys did the Pong experiment and showed that you could, in fact, create a hybrid biologic and digital computer that could play Pong reasonably well. It wasn't gonna set world records for Pong playing. Now take me from there to the CL one, your first commercial device that kind of brings this technology out into the world. How hard was it to go from successful experiments to commercialization and creating an actual shippable hardware product?
00:15:47 · Hon Weng Chong
[00:15:47] S3: Oh, really hard. I would say this is probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do because there's some element of doing something really cool, something like really novel and so forth. But more importantly is that if you're doing it as a commercial offering, it has to work a lot, like at least most of the time, rather than some random time. So it has to work very reliably. You do a lot of things that are very boring that no one really cares about, but it's important and vital for the product and the machine to work. So for instance, life support plumbing, you can't publish that, that's kind of boring, everyone knows what you need to do, but to actually go through the weeds of like developing, prototyping and testing is quite difficult. So it did take a lot of work, but what was actually the motivation for it was that we had a lot of our colleagues reach out to us after we had published the work and they were asking us, where do they, where can they buy this machine? Or not this machine, but the machine that we had used, what software do we had to write, whether we could help them if there were any questions. And we saw this recurring pattern. I said, look, people shouldn't be continuously reinventing the wheel, right? Like a round wheel works really well and we know how to make it. Maybe you should focus on building the rest of the car and we can build the wheel. And then you just use our wheel. If you think about explosion in AI, right, it had a very fertile ground because the groundwork had been laid by decades of gamers buying GPUs, keeping the likes of AMD and Nvidia alive until the AI systems came online. Right?
00:17:28 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:17:28] S1: The venture capitalists, you're welcome for all my purchases to play games. [00:17:32] S3: Exactly. So I think this is, you know, something that we we, you know, we saw that and we're like, well, you know, somebody's gotta take that leap and try to support the the the research community, and we decided that that was going to be our thing going forward. Mind you, we still do a lot of research work, know, and we we we Of course. Alright. We we have quite a few publications that came out. We have some very interesting stuff that's happening in the lab at the moment. But we think that this is more important that no one company can do this by ourselves. And we need to actually expand this out to everyone who's interested and and try to to reduce the barrier of entry for people to get into this space. [00:18:11] S1: Okay. I wanna talk about commercial applications in a second, but first, I wanna give people a quick look at this. So if you're on the video version of the podcast, you'll see what I'm about to show you. First of all, hon, what is this here? I believe this is from the the Pong era. It's a petri dish with what appears to be a small dish in the middle. So what is this?
00:18:11 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:18:11] S1: Okay. I wanna talk about commercial applications in a second, but first, I wanna give people a quick look at this. So if you're on the video version of the podcast, you'll see what I'm about to show you. First of all, hon, what is this here? I believe this is from the the Pong era. It's a petri dish with what appears to be a small dish in the middle. So what is this? [00:18:29] S3: Yeah. So this is what I was talking about, the multi electrode array. It's got a well, so that round thing, that that cylinder there is used to contain the... What we call the cell culture media. So the cell culture media is that liquid that bathes the neurons to keep them alive. It's very similar to, I guess, cerebral spinal fluid, you know, that bathes our own brain as these neurons are processing, they're consuming glucose, but at the same time, they're also producing lactic acid just like running, right? You end up with cramps. So, you know, one thing to be here we try to do is prevent it from getting too acidic and we had to use the CO two as buffer for that. [00:19:09] S1: Han, I'm just imagining now, like, you know, the dog didn't eat my homework, instead my computer got the cramps, so I couldn't, you know, it couldn't do anymore. Yes. I wanna connect this to this image right here. This, I believe, shows a a closer up of the neurons actually spread across a similar electric interface.