Leandro Reta Sabio

What is neuron degeneration? Skyler, a machine learning engineer at Neuralink, shares how brain-computer interfaces could bypass neural pathways that are broken due to ALS, helping restore the ability to speak to those who have lost it.

We’re spending $200B+ a year on data centers to power AI. One company raised $11M, grew human brain cells on a chip, and the cells taught themselves to play a 3D shooter in a week. Cortical Labs grew 200,000 human neurons on a silicon chip and taught them to play Doom. The cells navigate, target enemies, and fire weapons in real time. Their previous game, Pong, took 18 months on older hardware. Doom took a week. An independent developer with zero biotech experience built the integration using a Python API. The neurons did the rest. That compression from 18 months to one week tells you everything about where this is going. Here’s what the “can it run Doom” crowd is missing: each CL1 unit costs $35,000. A full 30-unit server rack draws 850 to 1,000 watts total. Your brain runs on 20 watts. A single GPU cluster training an LLM can draw megawatts. The energy economics of biological compute are orders of magnitude better than silicon, and that gap scales. The investor list tells you who’s paying attention. Horizons Ventures, Blackbird, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm. In-Q-Tel doesn’t fund science projects. They fund intelligence infrastructure. 115 units started shipping in 2025. Cortical Labs is now selling “Wetware-as-a-Service” through the Cortical Cloud. Developers can deploy code to living neurons remotely without touching a lab. They’re pricing access at the level of a software subscription while the hardware runs on real human brain cells derived from adult skin and blood samples. The Doom demo is marketing. The platform play is a bet that biological neurons will eventually outperform silicon at exactly the tasks AI struggles with most: real-time adaptation under uncertainty, learning from minimal data, and processing ambiguity without brute-force compute. The question was never “can it run Doom.” The question is what happens when it can run everything else.

Cal AI has been acquired by MyFitnessPal 🚨 Henry and I started Cal AI as 17-year old high school students with one mission: make calorie tracking easier with AI. In just 18 months, we’ve helped millions of people lose millions of pounds. And we broke $50m in ARR along the way. We are at an incredible inflection point in history where ANYBODY can build a product that can improve lives and make millions. As founders, we get a lot of praise. The truth is that this would not have been possible without our incredible 30+ person team. We are so proud of what this team has accomplished, and are thankful to everyone that has been instrumental in Cal AI’s development and success. Cal AI will continue as a separate app from MyFitnessPal. The combined team will share resources to continue helping people achieve their fitness goals!