Cortical Labs keeps 1M neurons alive for six months

Cortical Labs’ CL-1 biological computer supports a culture of up to 1 million living neurons for six months, pairing human neurons grown on a chip with software that delivers electrical signals and reads the response. The company describes the system as a code-deployable biological computer, while Wired’s field report says the Melbourne startup’s platform has trained neural cultures on Pong and Doom and aims to make the cells available through a cloud service. The six-month life-support window makes this a research-infrastructure fact rather than a silicon replacement: neuroscience and drug-discovery teams can watch the platform, but should demand repeatable task and energy benchmarks before treating living substrate as a compute alternative, much as the archive’s tiered-memory analysis separates a hardware claim from a deployable system.