Linas BeliūnasLinas Beliūnas • 3rd+Premium • 3rd+Building a Safer Internet with AI
| Scouting for top startups to invest in
| The only newsletter you need for Finance & Tech at
linas.substack.com
| Financial Technology | FinTech | Artificial Intelligence | VCBuilding a Safer Internet with AI
| Scouting for top startups to invest in
| The only newsletter you need for Finance & Tech at
linas.substack.com
| Financial Technology | FinTech | Artificial Intelligence | VC
Visit my website
1d • Edited • 1 day ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn
Follow
Wild: Scientists just built a biological computer that runs DOOM using living neurons. No AI model was involved, and the entire system fits in a shoebox
Australian startup Cortical Labs just showed a system where ~200,000 lab-grown human neurons control the classic shooter Doom.
No code runs inside the cells.
No gradient descent.
No training dataset.
Just biology learning
The setup is almost surreal:
→ A shoebox-sized biological computer called CL1 keeps neurons alive with nutrients, temperature control, and waste removal.
→ Game information is sent as electrical signals directly to the cells.
→ The neurons’ spikes are decoded into game actions: move, turn, shoot.
→ The culture learns during the session, adapting to threats and navigation.
This builds on their earlier DishBrain experiment that learned to play Pong.
But Doom is different.
Now you need 3D movement, aiming, and threat detection - all handled by a tiny living network.
And the energy numbers are wild:
↳ A rack of ~30 CL1 units runs on under 1 kW
↳ That’s orders of magnitude less power than comparable silicon AI workloads
Which means that ontelligence may not require massive GPU clusters.
It might emerge from physics + feedback.
Silicon gives us speed.
Biology gives us efficiency and plasticity.
The interesting future might be hybrid systems - chips doing math, neurons doing adaptation.
And if we can grow intelligence, we may soon need to rethink what actually counts as a computer…
P.S. also check out how to Turn Claude Cowork Into Your Personal COO that does the work while you sleep

:
https://lnkd.in/eS6JCk2G
Play
Loaded: 100.00%
Remaining time 0:01
1x
Playback speed
Unmute
Turn fullscreen on
Reactions
Like
Comment
Repost
Send
Add a comment…
Open Emoji Keyboard
Current selected sort order is Most relevantMost relevant
Peter Van Der Made • Following
Founder and Director at BrainChip Holdings Limited
1h
I think the same could be true for the Akida 1500 neuromorphic network. In its native mode it learns from spiking input and it has more neurons.
Like
9
Reply2 replies2 Replies on Peter Van Der Made’s comment
See previous replies
Kevin D. Johnson • Following
Field CTO – HPC, AI, LLM & Quantum Computing | Principal HPC Cloud Technical Specialist at IBM | Symphony • GPFS • LSF
1h
Peter Van Der Made Now that would make for a cool demo!
Like
1
Reply