This Week in Startups
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.
00:19:09 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong, S4
[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. [00:19:29] S3: Yeah. Yeah. So if we if we remember that image of the multilector array with that cylinder thing, in the center of a cylinder, there is actually a CCD or CMOS sensor. This is actually the same sensor that you have in your cameras. Wow. And each of those square grids are actually a sensor that captures the electrical activity. It's also somewhat photoreceptive, so that's why we have to keep them in a dark space. [00:20:01] S4: We all understand the importance of a crisp, memorable, easy to spell domain name. One of those names you can say over the phone and people know [00:20:09] S1: how to
00:20:09 · Alex Wilhelm, S4, Hon Weng Chong
[00:20:09] S1: how to [00:20:09] S4: type it in without asking you the spelling. But let's get real. The good ones are either taken or there's some poacher who's holding it and waiting for some huge payday, and they don't reply to you. Even if you want to pay for a premium domain, you don't want to use up all your runway on a domain name. That's just the truth for a startup. You want to put that valuable cash back into your startup's operations. So you should consider this: a. Tech domain. You can get a clean, crisp, super memorable name for your website and company, and signal out loud to your customers and investors: we're a tech company. That's instant branding for you. That's why over 500,000 founders have collectively raised over $5,000,000,000 in investment, building their companies on. Tech. So skip the hassle. Head to www.get.get.tech/twist, or go to your favorite registrar and grab your dot tech domain today. [00:21:05] S3: And so you'll see things like, you know, the the large long piece that's going across, that's an axon, and all the stringy bits are the dendrites. So if you think about that as just one segment and 50 that's microns, that's actually the width of a human hair, 50 microns. And so, yeah, that's how small it is and the the level of connectivity, the level of self organization as well is actually pretty phenomenal.
00:21:05 · Hon Weng Chong, Alex Wilhelm
[00:21:05] S3: And so you'll see things like, you know, the the large long piece that's going across, that's an axon, and all the stringy bits are the dendrites. So if you think about that as just one segment and 50 that's microns, that's actually the width of a human hair, 50 microns. And so, yeah, that's how small it is and the the level of connectivity, the level of self organization as well is actually pretty phenomenal. [00:21:32] S1: It's it's so... This is... This image just... I... I've actually stared at this for probably twenty minutes just straight because it's such a... It's literally to me, like, like, eighties science fiction, but just actually real and now turning into a commercial product. Like, this is so cool. And and I just wanna show everyone the culmination of all this work that you guys have done at Cortical Labs is this bad boy. This is the CL one. If you're watching... Sorry. If you're listening to the audio version, imagine a very long toaster with a clear plastic top and lots of tubes. And I believe this bad boy can keep neurons alive for six full months, Han, going back to your point about the plumbing for life support. Yeah?