What recording from neurons looks like
Each row is one electrode and each mark a spike, with occasional bursts across the network. This is a live illustration, not recorded data.
Where the term came from
A group of researchers coined it in Frontiers in Science in February 2023, as a form of genuine biological computing that harnesses brain organoids. An organoid here is a self-assembled three-dimensional culture of human brain cells. The authors present it as a complement to AI, not a replacement.
What has actually been shown
| Work | What it did | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| DishBrain, 2022 | Neuron cultures embedded in a simulated Pong game showed apparent learning within five minutes of real-time play | Human and rodent cells on a multielectrode array |
| FinalSpark Neuroplatform, 2024 | Remote access to living organoids for outside research groups | Over 1,000 organoids, 18 terabytes, over 20 billion action potentials recorded |
| Cortical Labs CL1, 2025 | Announced as a commercial unit in March 2025 | Reported price about $35,000; press reports differ on neuron count |
Where the claims went too far
The Pong paper used the word sentience in its title. The abstract itself reports goal-directed behaviour in response to feedback, and a later letter in the same journal challenged the claims of intelligence and sentience. Read the result as cells adapting to structured stimulation. It does not show a mind in a dish.
The efficiency argument
The 2023 paper compares the Frontier supercomputer, at 1.102 exaFLOPS and 21 megawatts, with a brain estimated at about 1 exaFLOPS and 20 watts. That gives roughly a million-fold gap in power efficiency. The authors say such comparisons serve only as illustrations. The Neuroplatform paper does not measure its own energy use, so no working system has yet shown this gap in practice.
The limits
Organoids die. The Neuroplatform paper reports up to 100 days in the best cases, and CL1 cell life is reported at up to six months. Getting information in and out is the harder problem: there is no equivalent of a compiler, so nobody yet knows how to write a program for living tissue. Scientists generally expect this to remain far behind silicon for a long time.
The ethics
The 2023 authors propose embedded ethics, with ethicists working beside researchers from the start. They state that the programme does not aim to recreate human consciousness. They also flag donor privacy, donor rights and intellectual property, and they name the Greely dilemma: the closer organoids get to modelling human brain function, the more they raise the concerns that made them worth studying.
Questions
What is organoid intelligence?
A research field that uses lab-grown three-dimensional cultures of human brain cells as biological computing hardware.
Did brain cells really learn to play Pong?
Cultured neurons improved at a simulated Pong game within minutes in a 2022 study. The claim that this shows sentience was challenged by other scientists.
Will organoids replace GPUs?
Not soon. They are fragile, short-lived and hard to program, so they remain a research tool.
Sources
- Smirnova et al., Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish, Frontiers in Science, 2023
- Kagan et al., In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world, Neuron, 2022
- A response to claims of emergent intelligence and sentience in a dish, Neuron, 2023
- Jordan et al., Open and remotely accessible Neuroplatform for research in wetware computing, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2024
- Australian startup Cortical Labs unveils world's first commercial biological computer, DatacenterDynamics
- This $35K computer is powered by a lab-grown human brain, PCWorld