Organoid Intelligence: Can Neurons in a Dish Become Computers?

How good are you at the arcade game Pong? I don’t think I’ve ever played it, but playing the game has become a rite of passage for machines or systems trying to display their “intelligence.” Google-owned DeepMind mastered it in 20151, and training artificial intelligence (AI) models to play it is even a bonus assignment in a computer science course at the University of Toronto2. We’ve all become used to AI performing human-like tasks. But can you imagine a group of cells in a dish also being capable of playing the game?

In 2022, Brett J. Kagan and his colleagues at Cortical Labs in Australia published a paper describing a system they’d created called DishBrain3,4. We often think of neurons firing as synonymous with complex thinking. But did you know that neurons grown in a dish fire too—and that this can be used to help train them?