Bactoneurons: Artificial Neural Networks made from engineered bacteria

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen some huge advances in 2019, such as Recurrent Neural Networks identifying Deepfake Videos and predicting the smell of molecules. The new decade promises no less! In early January 2020 itself, a paper was published on the implementation of… a single layer artificial neural network! A bit anti-climatic because you’ve seen much more complicated neural nets last year? Wait, there’s more: compared to its peers, this specific neural net was created by using, as neurons, living engineered bacteria! Let us dive into this straight-out-of-the-future research before taking a peek at what this could entail for AI as a whole.

Creating living AI

Our understanding of the natural neural networks in our brains are far from complete. If anything, the more we learn about them, the more we realise we don’t know about them! But there is one thing we know from first principles, and it is how Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) work. It was only a matter of time before the idea was tried: how about we implement ANNs in a way closer to real neural networks, using living cells? And this is exactly what scientists at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics have done! For those interested in taking a look at the paper, here it is.

As with all new concepts, we start small. In this case, single-layer architectures were created with simple purposes like a 2-to-4 decoder and a 2-to-1 multiplexer. Taking the decoder…