🔎This Is the Organoid You Have Been Looking for…BrightBrain, Inc.

In today’s email:

• 🔬 Research highlights: Brains to Bytes: How Human Brain Cells Are Powering the Next Computing Frontier

• 🚨 Industry news: MicroSOFT Is So Hard for This AI Thing, Launches Copilot

• ⏰ AI Startup Idea of the Day: BrightBrain, Inc.

• 🌐 AI and society: Lost in Automation: Will We Become House Pets for Superior Organoids?

🧠 Brains to Bytes: How Human Brain Cells Are Powering the Next Computing Frontier

According to Johns Hopkins University researchers, a "biocomputer" powered by human brain cells could be produced during our lifetime. Such technology is expected to enormously extend the capabilities of modern computers and create novel fields of study.

The team's "organoid intelligence" idea is detailed in the journal Frontiers in Science.

Computing and artificial intelligence have been driving the technological revolution. Still, they have reached a limit, believes Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering, is leading the research. Biocomputing is a massive endeavor to compress compute power while enhancing efficiency in order to push past our current technological boundaries.

For nearly two decades, scientists have used tiny organoids, lab-made tissue that looks like fully formed organs, to test kidneys, lungs, and other organs without using humans or animals. Hartung and colleagues at Johns Hopkins have recently started working on brain organoids, spheres the size of a pen dot that contain neurons and other elements that promise to sustain basic activities such as learning and memory.

This allows for more investigation into how the human brain functions, Hartung added. Because one may start manipulating the system and doing things with human brains that are not ethical.

Hartung began growing and assembling brain cells into functioning organoids in 2012, using cells reprogrammed into an embryonic stem cell-like state from human skin biopsies. Each organoid includes approximately 50,000 cells, roughly the size of a fruit fly's nervous system. He now plans to use similar brain organoids to construct a futuristic computer.

Hartung notes that computers that run on this "biological hardware" could begin to alleviate the energy-consumption demands of supercomputing that are becoming increasingly unsustainable in the next decade. Even if computers perform computations involving numbers and data faster than humans, brains are far more intelligent in making complicated logical judgments, like telling a dog from a cat.

The brain continues to outperform sophisticated computers. Frontier, Kentucky's newest supercomputer, is a $600 million, 6,800-square-foot facility. Only last June, it surpassed the computational capacity of a single human brain for the first time – but with a million times more energy.

Hartung believes it could take decades for organoid intelligence to power a system as intelligent as a mouse. He envisions a future in which biocomputers offer greater computing speed, processing power, data efficiency, and storage capacity by scaling up the production of brain organoids and training them with artificial intelligence.

Organoid intelligence could also transform drug testing research for neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegeneration, said Lena Smirnova, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of environmental health and engineering who co-leads the study.

"We want to compare brain organoids from typically developed donors versus brain organoids from donors with autism," Smirnova said. "The tools we are developing towards biological computing are the same tools that will allow us to understand changes in neuronal networks specific for autism, without having to use animals or to access patients, so we can understand the underlying mechanisms of why patients have these cognition issues and impairments."

A diverse coalition of scientists, bioethicists, and members of the public have been integrated into the team to explore the ethical implications of working with organoid intelligence.

🚀 MicroSOFT Is So Hard for This AI Thing, Launches Copilot

As part of its continuous commitment to AI and automation, Microsoft recently announced the release of the next round of AI product improvements across its business apps portfolio. These changes will also benefit Microsoft's Power Platform, a collection of low-code tools for building apps and workflows, as well as Dynamics 365, the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Microsoft's latest AI product upgrades for business apps will significantly alter Power Platform and Dynamics 365. Because of the upgrades, organizations can automate time-consuming procedures, improve customer service operations, and create tailored content. Among the enhancements are Copilot in Dynamics 365, conversation boosters and the GPT model in Power Virtual Agents, and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central. From March 6, these features will be available for preview and included at no additional cost in existing Dynamics 365 licenses.

🤔 What the Heck is a Copilot?

I am glad you asked. One of Microsoft's improvements is the inclusion of Copilot in Dynamics 365, a tool that attempts to automate some of the more monotonous sales and customer service tasks. Copilot employs large language models to access information from clients' CRM, ERP, and other business data sources during runtime. In Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, Copilot can assist in writing email responses to clients and providing an email recap of a Teams meeting in Outlook. Copilot may generate "contextual answers" to client inquiries via chat or email in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and provide an "interactive chat experience" for customer support staff that draws from knowledge sources and case history.

A glorified Cortana? Maybe not.

🧠 BrightBrain, Inc.

BrightBrain, Inc. is a theoretical startup that deploys a Smart Energy Management System.

A system that uses artificial intelligence to optimize the energy usage of buildings, factories, and homes. The system would evaluate data from sensors, meters, and other sources to predict energy usage patterns, detect anomalies, and recommend energy conservation measures. The system may adapt its predictions based on historical behavior using machine learning algorithms. The system might also interface with renewable energy sources to maximize their utilization.

Would you invest your bottom dollar in the startup?

🤖 Lost in Automation: Will We Become House Pets for Superior Organoids? 😟

Will Humans Surrender Their Decision-Making to AI? As digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) become, more widespread, new research from the Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center found that tech executives are divided on how much influence humans will have on fundamental decision-making. The survey asked 540 professionals in technology, development, business, policy, research, academia, and activism if they believe that by 2035, AI-powered intelligent machines, bots, and systems will be built to allow humans to easily control the majority of tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives.

Several experts are concerned that increased automation of business, government, and social institutions would erode individuals' ability to exercise judgment and make independent decisions. Yet, only 28% of respondents anticipated that intelligent robots would emphasize human control over technology-assisted decision-making.

In spite of this, some maintain an optimistic outlook, arguing that humans have historically benefited from technological developments and that, as automated digital systems become more deeply entwined in everyday life, new regulations, norms, and literacies will emerge to ameliorate the faults of technology.

Meme of the day:

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