Microsoft has teamed up with Swiss startup inait to create a digital brain modeled after living neural tissue. In fact, the partners intend to create digital twins of the living brain of varying complexity, from insects to humans. It is expected that following nature and evolution will yield better results in the field of artificial intelligence than the development of machine learning and neural networks.
Visualization of the neocortex and thalamus area along with blood vessels. Image source: inait
Inait was founded in 2018, but the project to model neural tissue in all its diversity began in the early 2000s as part of a 20-year project funded by the Swiss government. The project ended in December 2024, and its fruits are now ripe for transfer to interested research groups and companies.
Henry Markram, the leader of the Swiss project and co-founder of inait, said the project collected data from mammalian brain research and served as the basis for writing 18 million lines of computer code to create the simulations.
«It was mainly based on the mouse brain, but it is a universal recipe and can be used to recreate or copy the brains of other species, from ants to, in principle, humans,” he said.
Biologically accurate digital copies of human organs and the brain itself promise to cope better with learning and decision-making tasks than traditional computer models and neural networks used so far. Moreover, for most applied tasks there is no need to reproduce processes in the entire brain, which greatly simplifies the task of creating AI based on digital twins. A functionally self-sufficient “fragment” of a digital version of the brain can work as a stock trader or control a drone.
Moreover, the digital twin of the brain will continue to learn after being transferred to the client, becoming better than at the time of sale.
Inait chief executive Richard Frey said the company was founded “with the idea that the only proven form of intelligence is in the brain, and if we could master the brain, we could create a completely different, very powerful, new kind of artificial intelligence.”
He added: “I’m excited that we’re now building products where we train digital brains of different sizes and types to solve the toughest problems facing major industries today.”
Microsoft intends to use inait’s experience and expertise to expand the capabilities of its AI models for its own clients. In the financial sector, the partnership will focus on providing advanced trading algorithms, risk management tools, and personalized advice. In the field of robotics, it will help develop industrial manufacturing machines that are more adaptable to complex and dynamic conditions.
Digital reconstruction of the hippocampus with 800,000 neurons
«Inait is introducing a new paradigm for AI by going beyond traditional data-driven models and creating a digital brain capable of true cognition,” said Adir Ron, Microsoft’s director of cloud and AI for startups in EMEA.
The simulation technology developed by the Swiss project is being made available to researchers as a suite of free and subscription products from the Open Brain Institute, a nonprofit founded by Henry Markram. It could also form the basis for creating specialized simulations that would allow scientists to study and better understand neurological disorders such as autism, he says.
Previously, when studying the nervous tissue of the brain, scientists created atlases of connectomes – connections of neurons through synapses to transmit nerve impulses (thoughts and desires). The company inait went further. It kind of revived such atlases, creating a model of the working brain, which Microsoft hopes to put to the service of humans in the form of artificial intelligence that thinks like them.