Welcome, humans.

Alex Zandowski and Jon Pomeraniec are neurosurgeon-scientists doing something that sounds made up: growing roughly 150,000 living brain cells on a 4,096-electrode array and using them to study how brains compute.

Important caveat: The Biological Computing Company is not shipping a wet brain as your next GPU. The product today takes patterns discovered from those neurons, turns them into software, and runs on normal AI hardware. They say that already makes video generation about 5x faster with roughly 80% lower inference cost. The weird science is real. The useful part is somehow even weirder.

Here’s our favorite parts:

• (24:43) They already hooked living neurons up to a robot: Alex shows where the research is heading, with brain cells already participating in a lab proof of concept.

• (13:12) No, the product is not a brain in a box: The cells are the discovery platform. The neuron-inspired software they productized still runs on ordinary NVIDIA GPUs.

• (30:59) Why 5x faster actually matters: If a studio generates 100 clips just to choose a few, shaving minutes and cost off every batch changes the creative workflow fast.

• (32:56) So... where do the brain cells come from? Corey asks the obvious question. The surprisingly mundane answer is that established research labs can purchase stem cells and brain cells.

• (37:40) The robot endgame gets stranger: Their longer-term bet is that some future robot compute could be offloaded to real biological neurons at the edge.

The interesting part is not whether brain cells replace GPUs tomorrow. It is whether evolution has already found computational tricks that silicon can borrow today.

Why watch this? Because Alex and Jon make the distinction most coverage skips: the living neurons are the research instrument, while the usable product is software. You’ll see how they encode information into cells, read the resulting spike patterns, and turn those lessons into faster AI workflows.

Watch and/or Listen now: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

P.S. The “wait, you can just buy brain cells?” moment lands at 33:20. Science contains far more catalogs than movies led me to believe.

Keep scrolling for a plain-English walkthrough of how living neurons become GPU software, plus more episodes worth your time.

THIS EPISODE WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

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Mercor put 12 licensed CPAs to the test, asking them to complete four realistic accounting tasks, then compared their performance against AI models.

Just 18 months ago, the best AI models couldn't beat the accountants' average score of 37%. Today, leading AI models are achieving near-perfect results on those same tasks, highlighting just how quickly AI capabilities are advancing.

What does this mean for the future of work?

Explore the full findings in Mercor's latest research.

Special shout out to Outshift for sponsoring this episode.

Additional Resources: How 150,000 neurons become faster GPU software

The easiest way to understand the experiment is as a translation pipeline. Biology does the strange part. Software captures the useful pattern.

• Start with a pattern. Their array has 4,096 electrodes. They can stimulate electrodes in the shape of an input, such as a handwritten number.

• Let the neurons transform it. Roughly 150,000 cells respond with electrical spikes across space and time. That becomes a richer “neural representation” of the input.

• Measure what helps. The team looks for repeatable properties in those biological responses that improve a normal machine-learning task.

• Turn the lesson into code. Those neuron-inspired patterns become software adapters that plug into diffusion-based AI models running on standard GPUs.

• Judge it like a product. The useful test is not “did the neurons fire?” It is whether generation stays good while latency and inference cost drop.

That is why their 5x result is less sci-fi than it sounds: the biology is helping discover a better way to compute, then the software does the shipping. You can try their early-access demo here, or see the robot demo in AWS In the Field.

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Huge thanks to Slack and Alumni Ventures for helping us bring the night to life. It’s free, but space is limited, so RSVP and save your spot.

🎙️ In Case You Missed It…

Two recent interviews and episodes we think you’ll love.

1. What If Apps Didn’t Need Code?

TL;DW: Runway's Anastasis Germanidis explains Solaris, an AI system that can generate an app's interface directly as pixels, reacting to your clicks and typing without traditional HTML or CSS. He also explains how this technology could lead to personalized software, more realistic robotics simulations, and interfaces that change around you.

Why you should watch: If you've been hearing about "world models" but aren't sure why they matter, Anastasis shows how they could change the way we build apps, games, and even operating systems.

Watch / Listen: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

2. Can AI Help Cure Genetic Disease?

TL;DW: Mammoth Biosciences CEO Trevor Martin explains how AI and CRISPR are converging on a much bigger promise: turning some diseases people manage for life into treatments they may only need once. He also breaks down how Mammoth searches billions of proteins for smaller gene-editing systems.

Why you should watch: If CRISPR normally sounds like biology soup, Trevor makes the mechanism understandable and explains where AI actually helps versus where medicine still needs better clinical data.

Watch / Listen: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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Stay curious,

The Neuron Team

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