Hacker News Reader

Thought Emporium on YouTube made a few videos utilizing organoid bio processors but iirc their neuron source is pig not human.

https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw?si=-YVEmZhSrkgBj3I9

View on HN

Honestly not sure why these aren't. Surely there are no observable differences at such tiny scale and using human cells just makes you a target of wrath.

While human brains are probably just scaled-up chimpanzee brains, individual primate neurons are significantly more sophisticated than other mammalian taxa, particularly with epigenetic changes: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34800-w But also the plain structure of the dendrites and how they form connections: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22230639/

Now: I don't think wetware computing is actually sophisticated enough to leverage primate-specific advantages. But 10,000 primate neurons would probably be "more powerful" than 10,000 pig neurons. (OTOH it seems like corvid neurons are even more powerful than primates, maybe we should use crows.)

Oh, didn't know that! Thought the human advantage was mostly just balancing cancerous growth to get really big or something. And yeah, we should be studying bird brains, they are so smart in such a tiny package!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com