This Week in Startups
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?
00:21:32 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[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? [00:22:10] S3: We say six months because it's just easier to explain it that way. But actually, you can keep... You know, we as a lab and other people have kept them alive for months, even years kind of thing. When you're talking about trying to do large scale experiments, you need a lot of samples, you need a lot of units to get statistical significance and power through a large end. We wanted that scale, we wanted that longitudinal ability to study the neurons, but we also didn't want to have to spend a lot of effort doing it. So a bit of engineering went into a bit of plumbing to build this system that encapsulates the neurons in a sealed environment, which is really important because the neurons don't have an immune system. And so, if you had COVID and you coughed into it, they would actually just also get COVID.
00:22:10 · Hon Weng Chong, Alex Wilhelm
[00:22:10] S3: We say six months because it's just easier to explain it that way. But actually, you can keep... You know, we as a lab and other people have kept them alive for months, even years kind of thing. When you're talking about trying to do large scale experiments, you need a lot of samples, you need a lot of units to get statistical significance and power through a large end. We wanted that scale, we wanted that longitudinal ability to study the neurons, but we also didn't want to have to spend a lot of effort doing it. So a bit of engineering went into a bit of plumbing to build this system that encapsulates the neurons in a sealed environment, which is really important because the neurons don't have an immune system. And so, if you had COVID and you coughed into it, they would actually just also get COVID. [00:23:03] S1: So your computer could literally catch the cold. That's really funny.
00:23:03 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:23:03] S1: So your computer could literally catch the cold. That's really funny. [00:23:05] S3: Yes, pretty much. Don't eat bread next to it because you'll get the yeast and mold that goes into it and they'll kind of kill the cells. But we also built in our own neural interfacing system. So there's actually, you don't really see it at the base of the CL1 has a compute unit. So we have FPGA and whatchamacallit, general purpose compute units in there as well. That's where we digitize the signal. We then put it through our very tight processing loops And, you know, we're developing APIs and SDKs for this so that, you know, as a as a programmer, you don't have to go deep into getting these things to stimulate the neurons with high precision, but a lot of code, you can just use our API and we've developed a DSL domain specific language to express how do you want to stimulate these neurons at individual channels at low latency loops. [00:24:09] S1: That that brings me to kind of, I think, the question on everyone's mind who's listening to us right now, which is, okay. This is awesome. You've made a a digital biologic brain. What's it good for? And I I think that this is actually where my my knowledge really kinda run short because I'm not sure what compute loads, what experiment types, what commercial applications, the CL one and its successors, are going to be best at. And so when we think about the market that Corticolax is [00:24:35] S3: going [00:24:35] S1: after how big is it?
00:24:35 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:24:35] S1: after how big is it? [00:24:38] S3: I think the two most interesting things that we've learned along the way about this system here is that they do two things really well. Well, actually three things, but that third thing is attached to the second one. Firstly, they use significantly less energy than your traditional compute. They're not a von Neumann based architecture. The energy is derived from the glucose in the actual cell culture media. So doing a back on the envelope calculation, we came across some really phenomenal numbers. So for our original Ecpona experiment, we grew about 800,000 to a million neurons. And we did a very rough estimate where we just said, what's the glucose content in the media? How often are we changing the media? So therefore if we change the media, know, X number of times a week and there's this much of glucose and they're combusting all of it assuming, because they never combust 100%, you know, how much energy were they using? It turned out it was actually 10 to the minus four watts of energy. So that's 0.0001 watt of energy. It's probably even less than that because that's a massive overestimation. [00:25:41] S1: But but still, even with massive overestimation, it's effectively zero. And glucose, last time I checked, is is sugar water, so it's nice and cheap. [00:25:50] S3: Exactly. I mean, if you think about it, you and I, walking reference, use only 20 watts in our brain.