For years, “cloud computing” has served as a convenient, if somewhat nebulous, metaphor for accessing vast server farms over the web. Australian startup Cortical Labs has clearly decided to take the term with an unsettling degree of literalness, replacing a portion of that silicon with living, firing human neurons. And now, for a price, they’ll let you run your code on them.
Welcome to the Cortical Cloud, a platform that officially drags the concept of “wetware-as-a-service” out of the pages of a Philip K. Dick novel and into a publicly accessible API. For approximately £1,700 ($2,170) per month per instance, you can now “hire” a biological neural network (BNN) grown from human brain cells and fused to a silicon chip. It’s a bold, slightly bracing business model that promises to unlock new frontiers in computing—provided you have the budget and a fairly flexible definition of an “end-user license agreement.”
From Pong to the Public Cloud
If the name Cortical Labs rings a bell, it’s likely because this is the same team that famously taught a cluster of brain cells in a petri dish—dubbed “DishBrain”—to play Pong back in 2022. That experiment, published in the journal Neuron, proved that these biological circuits could learn and adapt in real-time, often far faster than traditional AI models. It was a watershed moment for what the company calls “Synthetic Biological Intelligence.”
Since then, they have scaled their ambitions significantly. As we have covered previously, their neural networks have Cortical Labs Plugs Living Human Brain Cells into an LLM . Now, they’ve turned that research into a product. The company has officially opened its platform to the public, inviting researchers, developers, and the morbidly curious to see what can be achieved with a literal brain in a box.
How to Programme a Brain
So, how exactly does one go about renting a slice of biological compute? The process is remarkably similar to spinning up a server on AWS or Google Cloud, which is perhaps the most surreal aspect of the entire endeavour. The heart of the platform is the CL1, a bespoke hardware device containing the BNN on a high-density multi-electrode array. This kit allows for both stimulating the neurons and recording their responses with microsecond latency.
Access to this wetware is managed through the Cortical Labs API (CL API), a Python library that abstracts away the bio-physical complexity. Developers can use a straightforward SDK to interact with the neurons, sending signals and interpreting the resulting activity spikes.
For those who want to take it for a spin before committing a few thousand pounds, Cortical Labs provides a simulator that mimics the behaviour of a real CL1 device. Any code developed on the simulator is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the real thing. The entire software development kit is open-source, and you can find the code on their GitHub repository. Hyperlink: cl-sdk on GitHub.
The Killer App for Wetware
This all begs the question: what is this actually for? Beyond the sheer “mad scientist” novelty, Cortical Labs is targeting three primary sectors:
- Neuroscience: Providing a standardised platform to study how neurons learn, form memories, and process information in a strictly controlled environment.
- Drug Discovery & Toxicology: Researchers can test the effects of new pharmaceutical compounds on real neural circuits to screen for efficacy and neurotoxicity, potentially fast-tracking treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s or epilepsy.
- Artificial Intelligence: This is the big one. Proponents of biological computing argue that brains are vastly more energy-efficient than silicon-based AI for certain tasks. By harnessing biological intelligence, we might discover entirely new computing paradigms that don’t require planet-sized data centres.
Of course, this cutting-edge access doesn’t come cheap. While a single instance runs to about £1,700 a month, Cortical Labs offers a discount for bulk orders—renting ten instances for six months drops the price to around £1,250 per unit per month. As the company cheekily notes, this is “cheaper than a human.” For now, at least. They are also encouraging academic institutions to reach out for grants, signalling a clear intent to seed the research community.
The launch of the Cortical Cloud is a strange and significant milestone. It marks the commercialisation of a field that has long been purely theoretical. We have moved from simulating neural networks on silicon to offering genuine biological intelligence as a cloud service. What will be built on this platform remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the line between computer and organism has never been blurrier.