Amazon bought a 960 megawatt nuclear reactor for AI servers. Microsoft restarted Three Mile Island. Stargate is spending 500 billion dollars on data centres. All of this to do, badly, what your brain does for free on the power of a dim light bulb.
The reason is that silicon processes information nothing like the brain does. Rigid chips with identical transistors trying to mimic something soft, three dimensional, constantly rewiring itself, with billions of different neurons each doing something slightly different.
Northwestern University just published research showing they printed artificial neurons from MoS2 and graphene ink that produced biologically realistic electrical spikes. They tested on living mouse brain cells. The brain responded as if the signal came from one of its own cells.
The breakthrough was accidental. Every other lab had been burning away the polymer residue left in the ink after printing. This team kept it. That residue created the switching behaviour that made the spikes biologically realistic.
The neuromorphic computing implications here seem significant. If you can print devices that process information the way neurons do at scale, the energy math changes completely.
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