Hello, World — From Living Neurons
Introducing Lobe Labs: why we're building open-source tools for biocomputing, and what we plan to do first.
Today we're publicly introducing Lobe Labs — a company dedicated to making biological neural network computing accessible to researchers and developers everywhere.
Why biocomputing, why now?
The computing industry is approaching fundamental physical limits. Moore's Law, which guided silicon chip development for decades, is slowing. Meanwhile, the energy demands of modern AI are growing exponentially — training a single large language model can consume as much energy as a small city uses in a month.
Nature solved this problem billions of years ago. The human brain — running on roughly 20 watts — performs computations that our best hardware struggles to match. Neural tissue is self-organizing, energy-efficient, and capable of continuous learning without catastrophic forgetting.
Recent advances in organoid technology have made it possible to grow small clusters of functional human neurons in a lab. Companies like FinalSpark and Cortical Labs have demonstrated that these neural organoids can be interfaced with digital systems, stimulated, and recorded from — creating a new substrate for computation.
The question is no longer whether biological neural networks can compute. It's whether we can make them useful — and accessible.
What we're building
Lobe Labs is developing three things:
First, a hardware abstraction layer — a unified software interface that works across different biocomputing platforms. Today, every platform has its own API, its own constraints, its own way of doing things. We're building the common language.
Second, an experiment framework — modular, reproducible tools for designing and running experiments on neural organoids. This includes stimulation protocols, recording pipelines, statistical analysis, and safety monitoring.
Third, compelling demonstrations that show what biocomputing can actually do. We're starting with music — using neural organoids for melody imprinting, completion, and generation. Audio output is visceral, immediately understandable, and scientifically rich.
Building in public
We believe biocomputing is too important to develop behind closed doors. We're committing to building in public: sharing our research, our code, our experiments, and even our failures on this blog and on GitHub.
If you're a researcher working with neural organoids, a developer curious about biocomputing, or just someone who thinks living computers sound fascinating — follow along. The future of computing is alive, and we're just getting started.