Inside the wild race to power AI with rat brains and ocean waves as physicists close in on nuclear holy grail
The grid is hungry.The technology boom has led to a huge demand for power generation across the US and startups, scientists and atomic entrepreneurs are stepping up with ingenious new techniques and solutions to increase production.Billions of dollars in contracts from tech giants and the government are at stake, and forward thinking companies are working a two-pronged approach — some focusing on creating power, others making its use more efficient.San Francisco-based Biological Computing Company is in the second category, betting the best place to start is with what’s, literally, top of mind. The company, founded in 2022, grows brain cells from rat brains or stem cells and stimulates them with electrical impulses to study how they respond.The data they collect is used to build mathematical models, called adapters, which sit on top of and improve existing AI models.“The brain is the best computer we’ve ever known,” Jonathan Pomeranic, the company’s co-founder and COO told The Post.
“What we’re doing is taking hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary advantages and applying them in the real world.”Biological Computing Company claims its first adapter, built for a generative video model, demonstrated efficiency gains as high as 500% while also increasing the quality of video output.On the heels of a $25 million fundraising round that closed earlier this year, the company is now developing its first text-to-video adapter.Some 600 miles north of Silicon Valley in Portland, Ore., Panthalassa has developed a new type of data center powered by one of the earth’s most powerful forces: our oceans. The company, named after an ancient superocean, makes spaceship-sized contraptions called nodes, which float at sea level and harness the power of waves.Often placed many miles from shore, where waves are largest, the undersea portion of the node rocks up and down with each wave, pushing water through a turbine to generated near-continuous power.There a...