Human brain cells to run AI systems?

Companies have started using real human brain cells to run AI systems.

San Francisco-based biotech startup Parasma has officially launched its new biological computing infrastructure, which uses living human brain cells as an energy-efficient alternative to traditional GPUs. Founded by Sean Cole, who previously collaborated with Cortical Labs to train neurons to play the classic game Doom, the company is building hardware that bridges biology and artificial intelligence. Parasma's custom architecture works by converting context words into electrical stimulation delivered directly to lab-grown neural cells, measuring their biological responses, and decoding them into linguistic tokens. This bio-synthetic framework offers a completely new model paradigm, opening the door for programmable wetware to process human language.

In recent trials, Parasma demonstrated that human brain cells could successfully tackle language tasks, achieving an impressive 90% accuracy in next-token prediction using full-sentence contexts. More remarkably, during a complex, non-linear token prediction experiment, the biological cells reached 78.1% accuracy, surpassing the 75% performance ceiling of a standard silicon linear decoder. According to Cole, demonstrating capabilities that conventional silicon decoders cannot represent is a crucial step toward utilizing living neurons in language modeling. Ultimately, Parasma plans to establish repeatable benchmarks to scale biological computing, aiming for a future where racks of living human tissue could run highly efficient, adaptive AI systems. In other words, one day soon, our AI systems and data centers may be built of off infrastructure that depends on racks of living brain tissue.

source: Parasma. (2026). Parasma Launches to Train Brain Cells for Compute. Parasma Press Release. Link: https://parasma.com/news/human-brain-cells-do-next-token-prediction