[frisco]

All I’m saying is that I think it will be challenging to produce a commercial product that achieves product-market fit for an application other than basic neuroscience research. It’s a cool tool but the practical drawbacks are myriad, and when you say “the brain is the single existing example of general intelligence,” that’s true of the whole thing, with glial ion buffering, ephaptic coupling, global oscillations, and so much more. We should be honest here: the system being studied in DishBrain is very far removed from that, so it’s tough to use the existence proof like you are doing.

I hope I don’t come across as uncivil, but you guys alienated a lot of people both in how you talked about “sentience” and also seemed to heavily hype this as totally novel.

I would never root against cool progress in neural engineering, but I would be curious as to what you think your first big product will be based on this. Past attempts have usually ended up pivoting to stuff like artificial noses.

Edit: I tried to ignore it but the bad faith attack on neuralink, which, look, I have complicated feelings about too — you should know the animal use data in the press is extremely out of context (to the point of simply being wrong) and also neuralink has had zero chimpanzees in its entire history.

[auastro]

> “the brain is the single existing example of general intelligence,” that’s true of the whole thing, with glial ion buffering, ephaptic coupling, global oscillations, and so much more. We should be honest here: the system being studied in DishBrain is very far removed from that, so it’s tough to use the existence proof like you are doing.

Our vision is incredibly ambitious. We can't build a whole brain yet, only small 2D fragments. We have a roadmap that goes all the way to a complete synthetic biological intelligence. The short and medium term milestones are concrete, achievable and valuable. The long term goals are more speculative, we're clear about that. It's a path, a tightrope, but still a path.

> [...] but you guys alienated a lot of people both in how you talked about “sentience” and also seemed to heavily hype this as totally novel.

We clearly defined our terms, our paper was accepted via a long peer review process into a prestigious academic journal. We coauthored with multiple top neuroscientists from around the world. Our discussion section alone has more citations than most entire papers. If scientists are "alienated" by this, it's a grievance that we cannot remedy.

Our work was hyped, we hyped it, it deserves to be hyped. Can you cite an example in our own words where we claim our work is totally novel?

> I tried to ignore it but the bad faith attack on neuralink, which, look, I have complicated feelings about too — you should know the animal use data in the press is extremely out of context (to the point of simply being wrong) and also neuralink has had zero chimpanzees in its entire history.

Please accept my apologies; it was meant to be more collaborative. I really do think that our system could be used to reduce the need for animal sacrifices and this is a good thing. I also believe you take making animal sacrifices seriously.

[hammyhavoc]

Can you provide the missing context re Neuralink animal usage?

[frisco]

Unfortunately I can’t share specifics about Neuralink. But the general points I will make are:

- in this field, monkeys are high value animals and experimenters will often work with the same ones for many years; they are not, generally speaking, a high throughput model.

- to the extent a company does need to go through a large number of animals for a study, the way this works is you start by figuring out all of the problems you might be worried about, and choosing some rarity threshold to verify absence of (safety against), and then animal numbers are derived from the power calculation. For example, to rule out a potential complication to no more than 1% of patients with 95% confidence… you need a lot of animals, especially considering multiple study arms. This is the values tradeoff we as a society have chosen to make and empower our regulators to enforce. There is often a negotiation for the least controversial species to use that will satisfy the scientific goals.