This Week in Startups
00:32:32 · Hon Weng Chong
[00:32:32] S3: Well, I think the c l two is... We've been thinking about it and there are a lot of features that didn't make it into the CL one that we'll probably start thinking about putting it into CL two. Mean, things, your standard things, right? Make it like smaller, make it probably cheaper to obtain, easier to program, maybe more modular units. There are quite a few things that we've been thinking about. Now the question is does it take the CL two or does it get pushed out to the CL three is a discussion for the team. But again, I think it's still a little bit premature. What we really wanna do is get the CL1 out to our partners, our research collaborators, and really get their feedback, what works, what doesn't work. So that way we can sort of triage and prioritize what we wanna do for the CL2. No point of putting in features that no one else wants. I mean, we might want it, but we have the ability to just spin up whatever, CL3, four, whatever internally. But if there are features that are missing that we have on our list that's kind of lowered down our sort of priority, but it would, you know, tremendously help the the community get going faster or do more work for less. You know, I think that's something that we wanna be prioritizing.
00:33:50 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:33:50] S1: You talked about using mice neurons at the top of the show, and anyone who knows anything about biology and experiments knows that a lot of a lot of mice and rats die. So that Yes. Is kind of par for the course for how we currently handle ethics. Are mice neurons and human neurons radically different? Are they relatively fungible? Silly question, but I'm not sure about the answer. Before I get to an ethics question, I thought we'd start there. [00:34:14] S3: So... And and this is the really interesting thing. We we used to think that there was no difference between a human and a mouse neuron. If you read any of the papers before, I think twenty twenty two, twenty, everyone said, yeah, there's no difference, all mammalian neurons are the same. And it turns out that I think on average, human dendrites are actually longer than mouse dendrites, but they have the same number of ion channels. So these are the gates that allow the potassium and sodium to go back and forth between the cell and the external environment. And that's what generates the action potential. But having the space out more, you actually have the ability to hold more so called electrical states. Well, that's the theory that's been pushed by some of the researchers at Harvard and MIT. And so, yeah, it turns out they are different and that probably contributes to the differential in the overall performance. And we've seen that as well. The human neurons are better at playing and processing information.
00:34:14 · Hon Weng Chong, Alex Wilhelm
[00:34:14] S3: So... And and this is the really interesting thing. We we used to think that there was no difference between a human and a mouse neuron. If you read any of the papers before, I think twenty twenty two, twenty, everyone said, yeah, there's no difference, all mammalian neurons are the same. And it turns out that I think on average, human dendrites are actually longer than mouse dendrites, but they have the same number of ion channels. So these are the gates that allow the potassium and sodium to go back and forth between the cell and the external environment. And that's what generates the action potential. But having the space out more, you actually have the ability to hold more so called electrical states. Well, that's the theory that's been pushed by some of the researchers at Harvard and MIT. And so, yeah, it turns out they are different and that probably contributes to the differential in the overall performance. And we've seen that as well. The human neurons are better at playing and processing information. [00:35:17] S1: But but for now but for now, though, Han, the the mice neurons are sufficient for the state of technology and the progress you guys want to make. So we're not there's gonna eventually become a new story entitled, startups takes human neurons, puts them into computer. Are we creating a new form of consciousness? Oh, oh, panic. But it sounds like So...
00:35:35 · Hon Weng Chong
[00:35:35] S3: Well, we actually do use human neurons now. Alongside mouse neurons, human neurons is the other really big area of research because that's where a lot of the biomedical stuff happens, where we're looking for new drugs, understanding disease models and so forth. We stand at the shoulder of giants and so we use a lot of the techniques that have been developed by the, what you call the synthetic biology, the biological engineering field to grow stem cells obtained from adult cells. So if we went back about ten years ago, in Japan, there was a researcher by the name of Yamakana. Professor Yamakana won the Nobel Prize, I think a few years back for discovery of inducible pluripotent stem cells. And what he discovered was that if you took anybody's cells, your cells, my cells, skin or blood, anything that would have nuclei, and you expose them to four compounds, you can actually reverse the clock back of these cells where they go from a blood cell or a skin cell back into a naive state... Stem cell that can then become... Turn into anything. We utilize that functionality essentially grow human neurons from stem cells. So this way we don't kill any animals, it's continuously renewable as long as you provide the right conditions. And yeah, how we do it now at Cortical Labs because, you know, we we don't really particularly like killing the mice as well, and so we think that it's actually
00:37:09 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:37:09] S1: easy Absolutely brutal. No. I'm totally in favor of that. I I think there's going to come in time some some questions that appear ethically interesting with what you guys are building, but I'm also of the opinion that they're not actually going to be ethically serious. I think they're going to be mostly good for not making fun of the media in my industry, but, like, great for a headline, but less dicey in practice. So I'm Yep. I... I'm very bullish on the company. Just before I I let you go, how has demand been for the CL one? I know you guys have a form up. I know you guys are working on deliveries. Has demand exceeded expectations? Is it about what you thought? Just where's the business side of things going? [00:37:48] S3: Yeah. Demand has actually far exceeded what we we we had expected. Suffice to say, we are now struggling to try to figure out our logistics and supply chain to balance supply and demand. We've had a lot of signups, particularly for the cortical cloud, I think over 3,000 sign ups. We have no ability to service more than 20 or 30 people on the cloud system. [00:38:21] S1: So you have 100x more demand
00:38:21 · Alex Wilhelm, Hon Weng Chong
[00:38:21] S1: So you have 100x more demand [00:38:23] S3: We have than 100x, yeah. And so they're on the waiting list and so forth. And then, you know, for the hardware, we have had a lot of labs and research groups reach out to us. We are, you know, very excited about this, but now we're looking at the challenge of, oh God, now we actually have to ship this thing and we'd have to ship lots of them. And if they break in the field, we're kind of screwed. So we better make sure they don't break out there. So there's a lot of like, we're doing our best at the moment to finalize the software, finalize the hardware, getting our partners ready. It's also very, very expensive CapEx wise, right? Because we have to, we don't charge our customers until we ship them, but we still have to build the units first. And so trying to figure out where the next source of funding is gonna come from is going to be a bit of a challenge. [00:39:11] S1: Han, why don't I just charge them half upfront and resolve some of your cash flow issues? [00:39:15] S3: Well, we could, but you know, it's... [00:39:18] S1: Do it. [00:39:18] S3: Yeah, we could do that. But you know, I I I think for us, we we wanna make sure that, you know, we we... I don't wanna do a Kickstarter kind of thing. Right? At the start of