Most artificial intelligence experts seem to agree that taking the next big leap in the field will depend at least partly on building supercomputers on a once unimaginable scale. At an event hosted by the venture capital firm Sequoia last month, the CEO of a startup called Lightmatter pitched a technology that might well enable this hyperscale computing rethink by letting chips talk directly to one another using light. Data today generally moves around inside computers--and in the case of training AI algorithms, between chips inside a data center--via electrical signals. Sometimes parts of those interconnections are converted to fiber-optic links for great bandwidth, but converting signals back and forth between optical and electrical creates a communications bottleneck. Instead, Lightmatter wants to directly connect hundreds of thousands or even millions of GPUs--those silicon chips that are crucial to AI training--using optical links.

Balls of human brain cells linked to a computer have been used to perform a very basic form of speech recognition. The hope is that such systems will use far less energy for AI tasks than silicon chips. "This is just proof-of-concept to show we can do the job," says Feng Guo at Indiana University Bloomington. "We do have a long way to go." Brain organoids are lumps of nerve cells that form when stem cells are grown in certain conditions. "They are like mini-brains," says Guo.

When the history of our time comes to be written, one thing that will amaze historians is how an entire civilisation managed to impale itself on its worship of optimisation and efficiency. This obsession is what underpinned the hubris of globalisation. Apple's famous slogan "Designed by Apple in California, manufactured in China" became its guiding light. So long as products could be made available to consumers everywhere, it no longer mattered where they were made. We first twigged this when the pandemic struck, and we became suddenly aware of how fragile supply chains built to maximise efficiency could be.

A journalist asks: "What technological advance allowed such huge performance gains?" The chief executive replies: "We created a new biological chip using lab-grown human neurons. These biological chips are better than silicon chips because they can change their internal structure, adapting to a user's usage pattern and leading to huge gains in efficiency." Another journalist asks: "Aren't there ethical concerns about computers that use human brain matter?" Although the name and scenario are fictional, this is a question we have to confront now.

The most important technology of the year was not Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse, Jack Dorsey's blockchain, or Elon Musk's, err, dancing robot. It was more likely the same thing that has propelled progress in the tech industry for decades. The one that lets machines juggle and manipulate information, faster and more efficiently every year. It is, of course, the silicon chip. The importance of semiconductors may have faded from view over the last decade as the web, social media, and apps came to the fore.

Apple is expected to unveil the first Mac computers powered by its own custom Arm-based processor at its'One More Thing' event tonight. The event will be livestreamed from the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California from 18:00 GMT (13:00 ET) on Tuesday, November 10. This marks the first time in the Mac's 36-year history that the line will be powered by an Apple-designed processor, which is said to offer better performance, higher bandwidth and consume less power than the Intel-based machines currently in use. Apple is expected to start shipping the first Arm Macs before the end of the year, with all of the devices boasting the new system within two years. Apple has officially announced its upcoming November 10 event that is set to reveal the tech giant's first Arm-based Macs.

There aren't many computer chips that you have to build a life support system for. You actually need to supply everything they would normally get in a fully biological body. As Hon Weng Chong, the CEO of Australia's Cortical Labs explains, it's all about creating computer systems that learn -- and that learn faster with less training data. That requires a different approach than standard Intel, Nvidia, or AMD chips, he says. "What we've actually built is a hybrid chip that is comprised of a CMOS sensor, so it's a silicon chip with a very fine mesh of electrodes. They're about 17 microns in pitch and there are about 22,000 of them," Chong told me on The AI Show recently.

Neurons in a human brain have been somewhat of a mystery for scientists. Unlike the traditional electrical circuits, the inner workings of the biological circuitry in the brain have always been less than predictable, apart from the complex biology they exhibit. Scientists at the University of Bath now seem to have decoded the bizarre behavior of our brain cells and replicated it on tiny silicon chips. Researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Zurich & Auckland collaborated on this effort. Designing artificial neurons has been a challenge for medical researchers for decades.

Future computers could be built smaller than ever before using the tiny biological skeletons that hold our cells together. That's according to one team of scientists, who have devised a way to make computer chips using cytoskeletons - protein scaffolds that give cells their shape. They claim that the silicon chips that brought computers to the masses in the 1980s are soon to be a thing of the past. Cytoskeletons are tiny scaffolds made of protein that give cells their shape and help them move. Pictured is a microscopic image of a cell and its cytoskeleton.

CHICAGO – Boeing Co. is creating a new unit to focus on technology that's seemingly straight out of science fiction, including super-fast computing that mimics the synapses of the human brain and hack-proof communications links based on applied quantum physics. So-called neuromorphic processing and quantum communications, two of the futuristic technologies Boeing wants to explore, may seem an odd fit for the world's largest plane-maker. But such concepts increasingly form the core of aerospace innovation, like the networks that may one day manage millions of airborne drones, said Greg Hyslop, Boeing's chief technology officer. The technology being developed around advanced computing and sensors is going to have a "profound impact" on Boeing, Hyslop said in an interview Wednesday. "We thought it's time to do this."