A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has announced the creation of an artificial neuron with electrical functions that closely mirror those of biological ones. Building on their previous work using protein nanowires synthesized from electricity-generating bacteria, the team’s discovery means that we could see immensely efficient computers built on biological principles which could interface directly with living cells.
“Our brain processes an enormous amount of data,” says Shuai Fu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst and lead author of the study published in Nature Communications. “But its power usage is very, very low, especially compared to the amount of electricity it takes to run a Large Language Model, like ChatGPT.”
The human body is over 100 times more electrically efficient than a computer’s electrical circuit. The human brain is composed of billions of neurons, specialized cells that send and receive electrical impulses all over the body. While it takes only about 20 watts for your brain to, say, write a story, an LLM might consume well over a megawatt of electricity to do the same task.
While electrical and computer engineers have long been interested in using artificial neurons as the circuitry for more efficient computers, the problem has always been how to keep their voltage low enough. “Previous versions of artificial neurons used 10 times more voltage—and 100 times more power—than the one we have created,” says Jun Yao, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. That means that previous attempts at creating artificial neurons weren’t all that efficient, nor could they plug directly into living neurons, which would be frightened by the increased amplitude.
