AI services like Apple's Siri and others operate by sending your queries to faraway data centers, which send back responses. The reason they rely on cloud-based computing is that today's electronics don't come with enough computing power to run the processing-heavy algorithms needed for machine learning. The typical CPUs most smartphones use could never handle a system like Siri on the device. But Dr. Chris Eliasmith, a theoretical neuroscientist and co-CEO of Canadian AI startup Applied Brain Research, is confident that a new type of chip is about to change that. "Many have suggested Moore's law is ending and that means we won't get'more compute' cheaper using the same methods," Eliasmith says.

A screen capture from a simulation movie of Spaun in action shows the input image on the right. The output is drawn on the surface below Spaun's arm. Neuron activity is approximately mapped to relevant cortical areas and shown in color (red is high activity, blue is low). Chris Eliasmith has spent years trying to figure out the ingredients and precise recipe for building a brain. He even has a book coming out in February--called "How to Build A Brain"--describing gray matter, dendritic connections and other brainy anatomy.

If you thought Siri was smart, wait until you get a load of Spaun. Created by neuroscientist Chris Eliasmith at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Spaun is "the world's largest simulation of a functioning brain," according to a report from Canada.com. Spaun is able to recognize numbers and memorize lists and patterns and reproduce them on command. This makes Spaun unique among its virtual peers, since other large-scale models of the brain "don't do anything," Eliasmith said. Spaun, which stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, has 2.5 million simulated neurons organized into subsystems to resemble the prefrontal cortex, basil ganglia, thalamus and other cognitive machinery in the brain.

Chris Eliasmith, the director of the University of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, Canada, is trying to build a brain. Eliasmith's artificial model, Spaun, currently has just 2.5 million neurons to the human brain's 100 billion. But unlike more computationally demanding simulations, which have run for only a few simulated seconds, it's actually capable of doing something with them. "There's been an attitude of scale for scale's sake," Eliasmith explains. "But for us, the focus was discovering how neurones can be organised to produce behaviours, such as solving simple intelligence tasks."