🧠 Brain-on-a-chip gets a body!

Thing 1 - Brain-on-a-chip gets a body

Scientists in China, from Tianjin University and the Southern University of Science and Technology, developed a robot that's guided by a lab-grown human brain organoid!!

As bonkers as it sounds, this is indeed a tiny, simplified version of a brain created from stem cells. This "brain-on-chip" setup connects the organoid to a neural interface and allows the robot to do things like grip items and steer clear of anything in its path.

They're calling it the world's first open-source "brain-on-chip intelligent complex information interaction system." It's a mouthful (abbreviated BICIIS? guess how you'd pronounce that...), but it highlights how this isn't just a one-off experiment.

They're creating a platform that others could build upon. This tech could be a game-changer for understanding our own brains, finding new medicines, and even developing super-advanced AI.

Of course, it also brings up some big ethical questions. When you're working with human brain matter in machines, you've got to think hard about the implications.

Where do you draw the line?? It's a different discussion whether an AI is conscious when it's a computer program vs when it's actual human brain cells...

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• Meta introduced Meta Perception Language Model (PLM), an open & reproducible vision-language AI for challenging visual tasks.
  It can watch a video and answer fine-grained questions about what people do and how they do it.
  The license they released it under is not as open as I'd like.
• Google released a new version of Gemini 2.5 pro
• Mistral released Medium 3, a multimodal AI that matches or surpasses 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Llama 4 Maverick on benchmarks with 8x lower costs
• Fellou: The world's first agentic browser - only for mac for now

Thing 3 - "You Still Have Time"

You will make no progress with your goals as long as you keep assuming that you still have time.

Life is shorter than you think, problems often pile up suddenly, you can waste decades being busy fixing short-term urgencies.

When you have the luxury of time, don't waste it.

- Orange Book

You have agency over what you do. And you can just do things.

Cheers, Zvonimir