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Biocomputing: The Future of AI with Fred Jordan

Jörn Menninger
vor 3 Tagen36 Min. Lesezeit

Aktualisiert: vor 2 Tagen


Fred Jordan, CEO of Final Spark, discusses the future of AI with biocomputing


Imagine a world where computers run on biological matter, consuming a fraction of the energy of today's silicon-based systems. This is the promise of biocomputing, an emerging field poised to revolutionize artificial intelligence (AI) and computing as we know it. In this episode of Startuprad.io, Joe Menninger sits down with Fred Jordan, the CEO and co-founder of FinalSpark, a pioneering company in the world of biocomputing.


What is Biocomputing?

Biocomputing utilizes biological molecules, such as neurons, to perform computations.  This approach offers a radical departure from traditional silicon-based computing, with the potential to dramatically reduce energy consumption and unlock new levels of efficiency in AI applications.    


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The Potential of Biocomputing

  • Energy Efficiency: Biocomputing could significantly reduce the energy footprint of AI, addressing a growing concern as AI applications become more prevalent.    

  • Enhanced Performance: By utilizing the inherent complexity and adaptability of biological systems, biocomputing could enable more efficient and sophisticated AI models.    

  • New Applications: Biocomputing could open doors to entirely new applications, such as human augmentation, advanced biosensors, and even hybrid objects that integrate living and non-living components.    


The Video Podcast Will Go Live on Tuesday, February 18th, 2025

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How Does Biocomputing Work at Final Spark?

Final Spark's approach involves creating "brain organoids," small balls of interconnected neurons that are placed on electrodes to send and receive information.  These organoids are grown from human-derived stem cells, offering a potentially scalable and cost-effective way to produce biocomputing components.    


The Challenges of Biocomputing

  • Technical Hurdles: One of the main challenges lies in "teaching" these biological systems to perform specific computations reliably and efficiently.    

  • Ethical Considerations: The use of human-derived neurons raises ethical questions that require careful consideration and collaboration with experts in the field.    


The Future of Biocomputing

Despite the challenges, the future of biocomputing looks bright. Fred Jordan envisions a future where biocomputers work alongside traditional computers, powering cloud computing services and enabling AI applications with unprecedented efficiency and capabilities.    


Final Spark and the Biocomputing Revolution

Final Spark is at the forefront of this revolution, pushing the boundaries of biocomputing research and development.  With ambitious plans to create a biocomputer server within the next 12 to 13 years, Final Spark is paving the way for a future where biocomputing becomes an integral part of our technological landscape.    


Get Involved in Biocomputing

The field of biocomputing is ripe with opportunities for researchers, investors, and anyone passionate about shaping the future of AI. Final Spark is actively seeking talent and funding to accelerate its research and development efforts.    


Conclusion

Biocomputing is a fascinating and rapidly evolving field with the potential to transform the world of AI and beyond. As Fred Jordan eloquently puts it, "Biocomputing is not just a simple new technology. It's a new industry that is going to stay and change everything in the coming 10 to 20 years."    


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Automated Transcript


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:00:09]:

Your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news interviews and live events.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:00:20]:

Hello and welcome everybody. This is Joe from Startup Radio, your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And today I would like to welcome Fred, who is an entrepreneur from Switzerland.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:00:34]:

Hello.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:00:38]:

You are the CEO and co founder of two different companies, ELP Vision and Final Spark. To get this little bit sorted out and introduce yourself, I would just ask you to introduce yourself and then we, we can work on the story. Why we are definitely here. A future technology called biocomputing. But first let's, let's tell your story.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:01:08]:

Well, you know, I'm a French physicist, actually engineer. And I went to Switzerland about 30 years ago, made a PhD in signal processing. And then I met another guy doing PhD with me. And then we create a first company called AlpVision. And this company specialized in applications of steganography. That means invisible hiding of information into digital image. And we use this technology actually to detect counterfeit products using smartphones. So you take a shoe, you want to know if it's authentic or fake.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:01:58]:

You use our app, take a picture, it's going to tell you if it's fake.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:02:01]:

Sorry, a stupid question. If you're buying something on platforms that would be before ebay and now, like all the competitors, does it also work if you just have a picture of the product? Can you tell if it's fake or not from a picture?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:02:16]:

Well, theoretically, yes, but in practice, I would say 99% of the case, we ask our users to have the real product in hand.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:02:28]:

Okay, I see.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:02:31]:

So this was, you have to imagine, and when we started this first company with this friend and I, we are basically in a garage. Okay. Trying to use the theoretical findings that we made during the PhD and to make a living. Okay. And the company went and is still doing very well, actually. We are protecting against counterfeiting more than 30 billion. 30 billion of products each year. Okay.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:02:59]:

So it's really huge. Okay.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:03:01]:

You being in Switzerland, I would have an assumption that stuff you would protect would include, of course, expensive wristwatches.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:03:11]:

Yes, they may indeed. But you know, confidentiality and discretion is a Swiss value. So we don't talk about what we protect, but the technology is provided to the consumers and nobody know that it's us behind the scene. So we work, we make money with the brand owners that pay us, actually, so, and so that was an interesting journey. Okay. Trying to, to make money out of some theoretical mathematical findings. Okay. And the company is still working well and we have offices now in Shanghai In New York.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:03:48]:

So it's really cool. And in 2014 we said, okay, this company is going well, let's make another one.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:03:57]:

When we run company is started off, it's not enough stress, right?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:04:01]:

Yeah. But the thing here is that we were lacking a little bit the R and D, the fundamental research part, and which we love. The co founder and myself said, okay, let's do something incredible in AI artificial intelligence. Let's follow a path that nobody has followed before or seriously followed before. Okay. And that was in 2014 and we created Final Spark. And. And this was again two of us in parallel with the first company.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:04:34]:

One question, Fred, doing a big shout out to your co founder, what's his name?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:04:38]:

So he's Martin Couter and he's a Swiss German. And so we are actually phenomenally quite different because I'm French and Swiss German, but that makes actually a good team. So we've been working together for, I don't know, 25 years now.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:04:59]:

I totally assume you can both agree on fondue.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:05:04]:

Yes, yes, it is mandatory. Otherwise, you know, federal state will take your passport. So.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:05:17]:

Okay. Okay. And so basically 2014, you founded what is today Final Spark. Can you give us a little bit introduction in the big picture and vision? How on earth did you bump into biocomputing? Because my understanding is you like physics, so I would assume you, you fancy big machines, you like them. How did you end up at Neurons?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:05:46]:

Honestly, this was not the plan. Really not. Okay. As you said, our expertise was in signal processing, of physics, so mathematics, a lot of mathematics and programming and things like this. Okay. And so we started to go into AI by exploring new paths, but purely digital, like genetic programming. So genetic programming is that you are basically random creating random source code. Random source code.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:06:23]:

Okay. That you compile and execute in the hope that it's going to do what you want.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:06:29]:

If you have any demand for that, I have a two year old here who's very enthusiastic about hitting the keyboard.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:06:38]:

For this to work, you have to create actually billion of programs of source code and execute them.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:06:45]:

As I said, very enthusiastic.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:06:51]:

And we used genetic algorithms approaches for this. When you actually try to. You said that my source code is an individual. I'm going to make some crossover with the other individual, which is another source code, and execute it. It's a very strange way of doing AI and this is what we loved. Okay. We were only looking at strange things. And another strange thing.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:07:16]:

So we were testing a lot of things and something else that we started to test was spiking neurons So I don't know. In the field of AI, normally people do not use so called spiking neurons. Normally in AI you use artificial neurons, which are much simpler than this. You accumulate some values weighted by some other values and you output another values given a threshold function. Basically, that's it. This is all chatgpt. Everything is working with this, so simple. And we said, okay, we are not going to use this model.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:07:55]:

We are going to use a more sophisticated model which is more realistic still, entirely digital. Okay? And that means it's a very well known model, known for 30 years, which basically is saying that this is a temporal activation through time that characterizes the activity of a single neuron. It's a spike, okay, an action potential, actually. So you can also have some simulation of artificial neurons which are spiking through time. You can also create networks and do some learning. And we spent a number of years on this kind of model also because one of the leaders of this field are actually in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where we made our PhD. So there was some cultural connection. And after a few years, what we had was a few hundreds, hundreds of simulated, wonderful, spiky neurons consuming about 5 kilowatts of power.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:09:03]:

So 5 kilowatts for 100 neurons. I don't know if you put this in perspective with your brain. It's 100 billion of neurons and it's not 5 kilowatts, it's 20 watts. So then we really realized that at this point, we could not scale this. Impossible. If you already consume kilowatts with 100 neurons, you're basically, you're hitting the limit of your model. Clearly, no chance. Okay.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:09:35]:

And then something else happened. We had a third guy who joined us at this point and he was doing the military service, which you may know is mandatory in Switzerland at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Okay. And he was working in the lab of Professor Markham on the Human Brain project. And this project, it's all about living neurons, not simulation. Okay? But because it was out of our field, we were not looking at biology, anything about biology, but he had to work there. Okay, so he was working and measuring real living neurons. And of course we were chatting together.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:10:21]:

And at some point the idea came a bit spontaneously. Like he said, they are consuming almost nothing, these neurons. And on our side, it was like the opposite. Our simulation are consuming way too much. The idea came at this point, okay, instead of trying to simulate neuron on artificial networks, let's try to use live living neurons.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:10:47]:

When you just speak about living neurons, what do people have to picture? Because. Because when you talk about living neurons as a chip, what I have in mind is like a silicon waiver with some gray matter on it. Where do you get the neurons and how does it actually work?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:11:08]:

Well, what you have in mind is not so far from the reality, surprisingly. Okay. The thing is that most of the time, you cannot get neurons directly, particularly if you talk about human neurons. It's almost impossible to get what is called primary cells. Primary cells are really cells extracting from a living body. Okay. So you can get primary cells for mouse or rats, but for human. No.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:11:41]:

So there is something else. Another invention that came into play here is a Nobel Prize called Professor Yamanaka in Kyoto. He invented a way to take some cells of your skin. Okay. And convert them into stem cells.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:12:01]:

Ah. And then from stem cells, he can go to neurons again. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. I see.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:12:11]:

And this is what we do in the lab. You know, just five minutes before this interview, I was in the lab doing some experiments using these stem cells. Actually, they are called induced pluripotent stem cells because we have induced the pluripotency. Because if you take skin cells that are not pluripotent at all, the skin cell can only become a skin cell. It will never become a neuron. It's dead for them. Okay, it's over. They have one thing to do.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:12:43]:

But if you induce the pluripotency, then you can again create whatever cells you want, including neurons. And this is what I was working on just five minutes ago.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:12:55]:

Ah, I see, I see. And how can you put this biological matter into a working computer? How do. How do you work with the connection? Because I do assume you have them, arranged them in some matter. You cannot connect, like every single neuron to its own very tiny electricity, electric circle or something.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:13:23]:

Yes. Just before I answer, I will make a remark to you as a human being.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:13:28]:

Yes, go ahead.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:13:31]:

Most of your neurons are not connected to your sensors.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:13:35]:

Okay, okay.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:13:37]:

Just, just, just. Just to. To be clear on this, which means in practice that what we do is that we are not first playing directly with neurons. We are creating something a bit more sophisticated, which is called organoid. So an organoid is a collection of living neurons connected together that creates, like, a small organ that is going to be, in our case, a small ball of half a millimeter. And to answer your specific question, we are going to put it. Literally put it, deposit this ball on electrodes, and then we can use the electrodes to receive and send information. And as you correctly noticed, we are Going to only discuss with a few neurons, which will be the interface with the rest of the brain organoid.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:14:28]:

I see, I see. And the big advantage that you've already hinted in the beginning is that it uses really much less energy than a normal silicon wafer would do.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:14:44]:

Yes. Talk about a factor of 1 million. Okay. If you want to see some publications on this or the publication for me is the one of Professor Artung, which I guess was done in the journal Frontis two years ago. You can Google Hartung Frontiers, what you can do.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:15:02]:

You can provide the link to me after the recording and I'll link it in our blog post.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:15:07]:

Yeah, perfect. Yeah, because it's, it's available for free. So. Okay, so you can get this. Yeah, so. And indeed, you know, looking again at your brain, if I wanted to simulate your brain, I would need by today's standard, a small nuclear power.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:15:24]:

Okay. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of energy. That explains why I eat such a lot of chocolate.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:15:31]:

No, because with all the chocolate you eat, you are still consuming 20 watts of power to run your incredible brain with 100 billion of neurons and 10,000 connections per neuron. You know, nature has to be extremely efficient and nature optimized nervous tissues for 300 millions of years to be energy efficient. So this is the benefit of, and the good thing of using existing products of nature is that it's already there and it's already really, really optimized with a factor of 1 million better that what we can do in silicon. And I just. And let me mention that I'm a physicist, okay? So I love about the integrated circuits and transistors and quantum mechanics. This is the things I know, okay. And I was not so happy to go in the biology direction because I didn't know anything about it. So if I could have avoided, I would have avoided it because I had to learn everything from scratch.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:16:36]:

So. But it's really. As an engineer, you have, I would not say the responsibility. This is a too big word you have. You have to have the rationality as an engineer to take the best solution on the market, I would say. And the best solution here is not silicon, is living neurons, period.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:16:55]:

Extrapolating a little bit out into the future, what do you think could make giving like all the big investments that we've seen just recently with a 500 billion into infrastructure for AI, what kind of difference could biocommuting make there?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:17:17]:

Biocomputing is going to open an entirely new industry. Okay. The most obvious application is that you talk about this investment. Talk about also all investments in servers and the power consumption that they represent. This power consumption is converted in electricity, which is converted into dollars. If you come up with a server like the Amazon Web Services, for instance, which consumes 100 times less, knowing that this is the primary source of recurring cost of the servers, the market is going to be huge. It's just obvious.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:17:59]:

And the question is, I would assume since it is not like serial production level you're working on right now, I would assume the production costs are currently pretty high and the energy consumption in the future is pretty low. And when you get to the point where also the production cost kind of matches the silicon cost, that's where it gets really, really competitive.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:18:30]:

Yes, but you have to realize that the production cost is going to be incredibly quickly lower than any artificial device. Incredibly. Last week, I mean, in the lab, we have created, I guess, a few millions of neurons. Only last week, okay. And the thing is that it's almost for free. I mean, when you have stem cells, they just multiply 24, seven. You get more and more and more. And you talk about production, but it's nature, it's automatic.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:19:10]:

It's made for reproduction. So the problem that we have sometimes is that we have too much. So it's not going to be really a cost of production. There are going to be other cost, but not on this side.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:19:27]:

I see. See. So I do believe we now do have an understanding of what you guys are doing to replace silicon wafers. And just for my understanding and the understanding of the audience, would your biocomputing those, those balls there, which I picture as kind of very small bioreactor, would they, in a computer, completely replace the cpu, or would you work alongside the CPU and all the other conventional pieces of a computer?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:20:07]:

Yes, you're right. Alongside is the right keyword. As I guess quantum computers are going to work one day alongside biocomputers, like dsp, digital signal processors work alongside CPU and GPU work alongside cpu. So this is going to get a little bit more complex. But I can tell you what is not going to happen with biocomputers. BIO processors are not going to run Windows 11, okay? They are not made for this. Biocomputers are very well done to run any task which is done for AI today. Because since AI is simulation of neurons, you can also use the real one.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:20:58]:

Okay? In many applications, this works not in all applications, but in many applications it works particularly in generative AI.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:21:06]:

I see. And that's basically with the big models talking about ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek that is currently what a cutting edge of AI is.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:21:19]:

Yes, absolutely. It's a very good example.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:21:21]:

I see, I see. And now can you tell us a little bit more about what Final Spark does in this whole future potential industry?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:21:35]:

Well, we want to be the first one to create a bioprocessor peril. Now, you have to consider that this is fundamental research at this point. Let me tell you what is the main point of research. The main point of research is exactly the same. Not surprisingly then, the main point of research was 30 years ago with AI. Do you know what was the main point of research 30 years ago in AI? It was about training. We were able because I've been working in artificial neural networks 30 years ago, and we created networks of artificial neurons. And the problem was how do you tune the connections between the neurons so that you get the output that you want for the given input? This is called training.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:22:37]:

If you have thousands or millions of connections to tune, it's impossible to do in practice, but someone came with a solution which is called the back propagation, which is basically an algorithm or a mathematical approach, which gives you the partial derivative of the weight of the connection in respect of the error the network creates. And with the help of this mathematical tool, we are able now to know exactly in which how to connect, how to change the connections to have a learning path. So when you talk, when you hear about machine learning, it is this learning. Okay? So this finding a solution made a big difference, made the difference actually between non working AI and working AI. It's very schematic, of course. But what is interesting is that it's the same problem today for us. We also have neurons. We also need to rewire them in a network so that when you input something, the output is meaningful.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:23:53]:

How do we do this? We don't know. Okay, no, no, Vet a. Let me tell you still a good news. One thing interesting, which was not the case with artificial neurons 30 years ago. We are sure it's possible. You know why? Because you are able to learn.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:24:21]:

So if, if a human brain can learn, the cells within the human brain should also be able to learn, right?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:24:27]:

Correct. Particularly knowing that it's not only the human brain, but bees and insects and very primitive animals are able to learn also. So we know it's possible. We just have to find how nature does it in order to reproduce it in vitro in a way which is reliable.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:24:43]:

Oh, I see. See, see. Okay. And that's basically the part where you are. My understanding is that they are only a handful of potential competitors. Out there you've been talking about like three companies globally with Final Spark being one of them.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:25:02]:

Yeah, yeah. It's great. It's an incredible era actually. You know, we live in a world where it's very difficult when you wake up in the morning as an engineer, I say I'm going to work on something when nobody thinks about it and it's going to make a revolution. How many fields can you imagine next? Okay. And I'm going to start by myself. Yes. And I can do this.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:25:23]:

Biocomputing is one of this very, very rare field that still exists today. And indeed you're right. We are three companies in the world. And I'm not going to lie, I would prefer that there are more of them, not less of them. Okay. Because this is going to be a revolution. But we need a critical mass of companies competing together so that venture capitalists and, and money starts to flow into this research.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:25:51]:

I see. Do you have like a kind of idea when you would or you guess you would be able to produce on an economic, industrial stale biocomputing just for simplification? I know it's not correct, but biocomputing CPUs that we stick to a known frame of reference.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:26:23]:

Yeah. Our business plan states that we should be able to have a first bio server in about 12 to 13 years. 1.3. What we target is basically cloud biocomputing. So you know about. Cloud computing is the same but powered by bioprocessors.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:26:49]:

I see basically here around Frankfurt we have D6, the world's largest Internet. Not so in the area I live around here there's a lot of very big buildings with a lot of air conditioning on top. And that's, that's basically like all the places where all the calculations are done, those data centers.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:27:10]:

This may be replaced maybe one time in the future. Actually, you know, for me it's very clear. Biocomputing is not. It's not just a simple new technology. It's a new industry that is going to stay and change everything in the coming 10 to 20 years.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:27:27]:

I see. Before we get into challenges and ethics, let us do a little ad break. Hey guys, welcome back. I'm talking to Fred Jordan, co founder and CEO of Final Spark, one of just three companies in the world working on bio computing where they are going to replace or work alongside the cpu, a bio CPU that we just talked about before. I would now like to go a little bit into the challenges and ethics of biocomputing. My question would be, what are the most immediate Bottlenecks in biocomputing, Is it scaling, is it stability, is it reproductibility? Or is it just teaching?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:28:20]:

I would say teaching first. Teaching is the big thing. Okay. Really, you know, which is incredible because in biology you make a difference between in vivo and in vitro teaching and learning in general has been studied in vivo for the past 50 years. Hundreds of thousands of publications on this field. However, comparatively to this, if you think about in vitro learning, that means not in a living animal. Basically, there is almost, I don't know, less than 10 publications.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:29:05]:

So that means in vitro learning would be you basically teaching a baby, an animal, something before it is born.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:29:18]:

It's even not a baby. It's even not an animal. When we create a brain organoid, it's just thousands of neurons connected together in a mole, in a small ball. That's what it is. So it even doesn't look like a brain. It's a nervous tissue, but a nervous tissue. We believe it's reasonable that it's possible to make it learn something.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:29:51]:

I see, I see. What is the upper limit to what biological neurons can compute efficiently? Or do you expect exponential progress similar to something like Moore's Law in silicon chips?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:30:10]:

Yes and no.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:30:13]:

In German, we do have a wonderful word for this. We say ja at nine. It's called J. Exactly.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:30:22]:

Now, because with computer chips, it's about artificial systems. That's. So it's question of light diffraction and how you can compensate this in order to engrave smaller and smaller circuits. Okay? But here you have to realize that we are not making anything. I am not controlling how. Well, I'm controlling very remotely, okay, how these neurons are growing. I cannot change the intrinsic. Well, I can change to some extent, but I'm very limited in the number of change I can do to these neurons.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:31:05]:

For instance, the action potential is going to propagate always more or less at the same speed in all the neurons. I do whatever I do, so. And I'm not going to be able to pack more neurons in the same space than they would naturally accept. Accept. You know, a transistor is not accepting something, okay? It's going to passive device, which is controlled by human being. Here you have to play with living things. So it's a bit different. You have to.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:31:40]:

To behave differently. But coming back to scalability, there is a big, big difference here. I can grow a nervous tissue. Like I said at the beginning, it's half of a millimeter, half millimeter today, but tomorrow, theoretically, I could do 1 cm. I could do 10 cm. Actually, I could do 100 meters of nervous tissue. I could culture it. There is no limit to this.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:32:10]:

I mean a football field entirely. A field with a 5 centimeter nervous tissue is going to represent a serious amount of computational power. But I will need to do nothing actually to get. It's just more like when you do agriculture. So you grow things, you grow plants, and here you grow neurons. So, so it's more going to be in the scale of things, how big we can handle them.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:32:44]:

I was wondering at the moment you were talking about this. Usually we only talked about electricity consumption. Do you also need to provide sustainment for the cells? I do assume they, they are not only living from electricity.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:33:06]:

Well, they're not living at all from electricity, not even remotely. Okay. It's not going to help them in any way. So we are not using electricity for this. For this we use so called culture medium. So these are. Medium is basically water with many things inside. And the things that we put in the water to make cells live.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:33:36]:

I mean this, this mixture has been invented in the 60s, okay? So it's that science fiction, it's really old school way of doing. So we are not inventing anything here. So you take water, you had all the vitamins, all the amino acids, many salts, glucoses, and you can put your cells inside that are going to leave for weeks and months.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:34:05]:

Talk about the ethics here. How do you personally wrestle with the ethical implications of you using human derived neurons for computing, even though they, they're your own?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:34:19]:

So here is the, the big change, okay? I was able to learn biology because this is still science, okay? And I'm an engineer, it's okay. But here you talk about ethics and now you hit the limit of what I can learn and my expertise, okay? And I don't know how to answer to these questions honestly. It doesn't mean that these are not serious questions. I believe these are very serious questions, okay? And what we decided to do actually is to make connections with the academics, okay? And because there are people working in ethics, this is their job, okay? They are competent for this. They are experts, okay? We are not, okay? I can tell you about many other things, but not this one. And many other things, I cannot tell you anything, you know, and for these academics, what we did is that we, we are starting to come to philosophy conference where we explain what is biocomputers to a teacher and you say, guys, okay, here is this thing. We bring the science and bring the ethic.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:35:29]:

When I've been thinking about this interview here I was curious, do you see a point where the conversation shifts from using neurons to do damn stupid computing to really collaborate with neurons in a fundamentally new way?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:35:49]:

First remark that strikes my mind when you ask this question is that don't you think that in the past few months we're starting to collaborate with computers in an entirely new way with ChatGPT and things like this?


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:36:06]:

Yes. And I can see definitely human traits in there when they're getting lazy.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:36:13]:

So now the benefits and the consequence of the, of the technology is always a vast debate. Okay, what can I can already tell you is that you're better off living today than 1,000 years ago. Okay, so total benefit is clear now. How can we interact with these nervous tissues? What is it going to change, I start to wonder with this large language model, interactions that we are using more and more every day. Like we have digital companion, like general AI is like it's there, okay? Actually it's actually less disruptive than we thought it would be so far. And the fact that this interaction would be done by nervous tissue with nervous tissues instead of digital simulations of nervous tissue, what difference does that make actually? Is it that important?


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:37:17]:

That is something that would take quite a lot of philosophers quite some time to work this out. I see, I see.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:37:25]:

Yeah, we're going to keep them busy for some time with these questions.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:37:29]:

I see. Talking about the applications and real world impact here, what do you think what industries will be the earliest adopters of biocomputing and why?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:37:45]:

So this one is quite simple actually. All industries who are using AI, therefore all industries and also those who use AI and care about their cost. All industries again, because what we are going to develop first is a server when the rental price is going to be 1/10 to 100 of Amazon Web Services. This is what we're going to do.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:38:15]:

I see, I see. How soon could we see bicomputers solving real world problems in fields like cryptography, optimization or even drug discovery?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:38:31]:

No, no, for cryptography I'm skeptical. Okay. This one in particular, okay. It's not, it's not appropriate. I don't believe. I'm skeptical for this. I would really bet on quantum computers, not only because I love quantum effects and quantum mechanics, but for hardcore raw computation and speed. Okay, this is not the appropriate approach.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:39:02]:

Now if you talk about drug discoveries, for instance, so here we can connect again with actually machine learning and traditional AI. And this can be used in the same way as AI for drug discoveries, for instance, protein folding and prediction of protein effects. This would work fundamentally, this could work the same way. Actually, the main difference is always how much power you need to use to get this result. If you think about competitiveness in all countries, it's always about how much energy do you have and the cost of your energy. Okay, so for if, for the same energy, you can have 100 times more. It's like if you had 100 more energy or the energy was one of the times more, less expensive.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:40:05]:

I have to admit I'm a big fan of the sci fi author Peter Hamilton. And therefore the question could biocomputing have a direct application in human augmentation such as interfacing with AI or even the human brain itself? Because there are already companies out there who putting silicon chips into human brains. Wouldn't it be easier to connect via a neuron by a computing based chip?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:40:33]:

So first of all, science fiction and Peter Hamilton and all the other science fiction authors, I love them and I never go to bed without reading at least 15 minutes of science fiction every day. This is a rule.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:40:46]:

Who's your favorite author before we get into into the other stuff?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:40:50]:

Well, I have to say Arthur C.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:40:52]:

Clarke is the Arthur C. Clarke.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:40:54]:

Yeah, so. So yes, you're right. Also in this discussion, we've been talking about biocomputing. Okay. But as soon as you start to look at neurons as small machine, you are changing the way you look at things. And when you change the way you look at things, this may lead actually to new applications. And you're right. Interfacing a human brain with a brain organoid is not challenging.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:41:29]:

A number of research has been published on related fields, and you are first to consider that if I wanted to interface the brain algorithm with your brain, what I would do first, I would take your skin, differentiate cells which have your DNA, so they will not be rejected by your immune system. They will be exactly your cells. And then I can tell you also, and you can sometimes see this online on our website, when we have brain organoids that we put together like this, we touch them, after two weeks, they're entirely fused. So neurons love each other, they love to connect. Okay, so it's absolutely not a challenge to connect. So the scenario that you described, of course makes sense. So now if you get into science fiction, you could say, okay, I trained a brain organometer to speak Chinese. I put this in my head, I'm going to speak Chinese.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:42:29]:

I was a bit skeptical that this could work as simple as this. But of course things are going to change a lot in this direction. But not only this. I guess at some Point, you know, today, all the objects which are around you, where you're talking, okay, these. Well, most of the objects, I guess, are not living. Okay, you've got a mouse, a microphone. Okay, these are not living. Maybe you have a plant of flower.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:43:01]:

Okay, these are living. So you have two categories. Living, not living. Okay, not living most of the time. More and more, these are things which are created by human beings. But in the future, you can imagine if you talk about science fiction, you could have objects which are just in between, hybrid, partly living. For instance, a mouse that will have nervous tissue that will recognize. Even before you press that, you want to press.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:43:35]:

So a way of interacting with objects which is totally different because they are just the interface between objects and living things, that they integrate some living parts.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:43:50]:

I like this question. If you had unlimited funding and no regulatory barriers, what would be the first moonshot experiment you'd launch tomorrow?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:44:03]:

So first, this question is not as theoretical as you might think, since I'm looking to raise 50 million of euros at this point. Of course, investor told me exactly the same question. So, and the answer is clear. We are going to hire first. We need researchers here because we have to test a number of things in parallel. We've gone quickly on a number of things, but there are a number of challenges that we have to tackle. And we have to create larger brain organoids, we have to create larger number of electrodes, increase lifetime. And the first thing I would do is that hire more people, increase the size of the labs to have more and more experiments running in parallel.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:44:56]:

I don't know what just sparked the idea, but just, just out of stupid curiosity, we're talking about living cells here. They won't be affected by computer virus, but could they be affected, meaning knocked out by a traditional virus or bacteria that gets somehow into the processor?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:45:23]:

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so what you describe is a very well known of anyone doing cell culture today and for. And since the past 50 years. So in the lab just below here, again, so I can tell you we are absolutely paranoid with this because they have no immune system. Okay. And we are not using antibiotics most of the time. So that means that if we have one single bacteria somewhere, everything is dead in 24 hours.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:45:56]:

So we have to be extremely careful about what we're doing.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:46:02]:

I see. When I was brainstorming a little bit on questions, I was wondering, traditionally processors have been used to fulfill like stupid repetitive tasks, but could you see computers based on bioprocessors that can help in areas that have. Haven't traditionally been Associated with computing, creativity, art, helping handicap people talking about fusion of neurons or even emotionally based AI.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:46:37]:

So your question covers a lot of things. Okay, it does, yes. And your question also is based on you have voluntary put aside chatgpt in your question and things and LLM. Okay. Because of course, nowadays computers are not what they used to be anymore. There's a little bit more. And yes, definitely we can. Well, the first thing is about the complexity of what you are generating.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:47:11]:

When you use real neurons, they are going to have way more connections. So it's one thing. Okay. And they are in 3D. Our processors are not in 3D. Okay. They are in 2D. Okay.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:47:23]:

Now about interacting with you. It's very not easy, but in principle, people do it currently in research. Easy to modify a neuron to detect molecules, for instance. Like if you breath, for instance, it could detect that you have a cancer. Analyzing the molecules that you breathe. Okay, so talk about interaction between a living object and a human being could be also in that direction. Okay. So of course the sensors are going to change a lot because these are biosensors.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:48:04]:

Totally, totally good to detect complex molecules, which is extremely challenging in an artificial manner. So, yes, the way we are going to interact and the fact that it's living and also it's living at the same speed as us. So it's interesting, a computer is performing, I don't know, 1 billion computations per second. This is not something that we can imagine. But our nervous tissue will work exactly at the same speed as the brain are going to be that we have. Okay. This is part of the. So everything is going to be in sync with us as human being.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:48:44]:

It's a totally different way to approach computing.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:48:48]:

The last question of this section would be what one unexpected but potentially game changing application of biocomputing that nobody's talking about yet. Can you see this is a very.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:49:01]:

Interesting question, you know, because the first thing I believe that the most important application that is going to be absolutely game changer, okay. Of biocomputing is not only more efficient servers. This is already incredible, but it's not this. This is something else. But I don't know it. But you know, you know, there is a guy who was named Mr. Shockley. Mr.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:49:37]:

Shockley invented about 80 years ago the solid state transistor. I can promise and guarantee you, okay. That he had no clue that we would use his invention to create smartphones, okay. Because that was 80 years ago. So if you ask me what are going to be used by your computers, I'm not able to answer. I know it's going to be big and way bigger than I think.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:50:11]:

Okay, I see. We'll be back after a second short ad break. Okay guys, we are back here with last section interviewing Fred, co founder and CEO of Final Spark, one of just three companies in the world working on biocomputing. This is the very last section and I'm interested in like your personal take and legacy. I'm curious what motivates you to work on this every day? What keep and what keeps you awake at night?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:50:53]:

You know, I co created the first company that makes money which is very good and highest people were very good. Okay, so now look at earth from 100 million of kilometers. But you will see a small ball like this. Okay. Imagine you are standing in space alone, looking at earth like this. What can you do on Earth that is still meaningful when you look at this distance from Earth? And making more money is not one of them. Okay. However, creating a new form of intelligence.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:51:48]:

Yes, it makes sense.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:51:53]:

I see. If somebody writes the definite history of biocomputing 50 years from now, where do you hope your name appears in that story?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:52:10]:

You know, if it appears only somewhere, I would, I would, I would be so, so delighted. You know, first you have to imagine that 12 months ago we were basically totally unknown. And then we became viral with the publication we made in Frontiers in May. Two weeks ago I found there is a Wikipedia article which is titled Science in 2024 where they list all the important things that happened in science in 2024 and we are listed here. That was talking about science fiction. This was really science fiction because I could not believe my eyes. So I don't know what. But right now I'm not thinking about this.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:52:58]:

I'm just thinking about the next experiment and what we can do better right now.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:53:04]:

I see another theoretical here. If you could have a conversation with, with Alan Turing, John von Neumann or any other computing pioneer, what questions would you ask them about biocomputing?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:53:22]:

Well, von Neumann would love the idea, of course, because this is a von Neumann machine. Okay, so we will have a good friend. Okay. There are many things about information theory, about specialty, about movement. I definitely would need to prepare this meeting.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:53:48]:

And arrive with like a physical catalog of many, many pages, just full of questions.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:53:55]:

Maybe not only questions, but more. I would actually ask, what would you do if you could program living neurons? I would actually, I think, I'm sorry to say, maybe it's obvious. I think I would ask the same question that you asked me since the beginning of this. Sorry to disappoint, but that's totally fine.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:54:22]:

That's big breaks for me here. Totally good here. What do you hope your biggest contribution to biocomputing will be? Not just scientifically, but also maybe philosophically.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:54:34]:

I think there is something with technology, is that there are human beings and technology. And more and more people start to say it's not good. Technology is too far from human beings. Actually, technology is almost against human beings. Okay. And as an engineer, I don't like it. Okay. I want to reunite technology and human beings, okay? They should live in harmony.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:55:07]:

Okay. And I believe biocomputers and synthetic biology can achieve this. Okay. We have done very good. Artifacts, which are called machines, artificial things. We still need to have a good interface with us as human being. This is the last piece that we should build and we are going to do it. I'm sure.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:55:35]:

Talking about going to build it, going to do it. You already talked about fundraising, going to the very mundane pieces here again, you guys are currently on the outlook for raising funds, right?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:55:49]:

Yes. Yeah, indeed. So our ambition is to raise 50 million of euros. Okay. And so we are talking a number of. With a number of people worldwide actually. So we hope we can gather this maybe in three series, ABC, 10, 20, 20. Honestly, I would prefer to avoid this because I don't want to be running after money constantly.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:56:16]:

I want to work on the science here. And this is the big challenge and the fact that we are standing in Europe, which doesn't help at all because I would already have this Money in the U.S. probably.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:56:30]:

If people made it until here. That's almost an hour of listening. Thank you very much, Greatly appreciate it. But those people are definitely interested in you and biocomputing. Are you open to talk to new people looking for talent?


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:56:45]:

Yes. So we are. We handle actually a constant stream of people who want to work with us several per week. Okay. So. And these are only people who want to be hired. Okay. In addition to this, we have internships who want to work here in the lab.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:57:03]:

Okay. So we answer to everyone and we have some process to get people working with us.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:57:13]:

Great. So everybody who's interested now we link down here in the show notes, your website and the people can just basically reach out to you directly.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:57:24]:

Yes, they can also do is that we have a Discord server. So they can go to the Discord server and we will answer directly. We answer directly to the questions of everyone. So first they can see all the questions which have already been asked and then we are happy to extension.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:57:43]:

Great. So Fred, thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you. It was more fun and much more extensive than I expected. Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure to talk to you. Hopefully to have you back in a few years and talk about your successes there.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:58:01]:

Yes, I would be happy to do so.


Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:58:04]:

Great. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Bye Bye.


Fred Jordan | CEO and Co-Founder FinalSpark [00:58:11]:

That's all folks. Find more news streams, events and interviews@www.startuprad.IO. remember, sharing is caring. Ra.

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