Science

You actually legit feed it snacks haha. There's a nutrient mixture/sludge to keep them alive.

And if the inevitable happens, does it need to give consent?

Yes.

Don't worry all neurons are cage free, grass fed, open range

For real though, where the neurons come from is as interesting/impressive as the computation itself. The guys at Cortical, at least in prototyping, give blood samples, revert blood cells into a stem cell state, and then (over the course of 6 months) they convert their stem cells into neurons before putting them into a dish. (To be clear, Cortical did not invent the stem cell tech at all. Apparently its standard practice and nobody in the bio engineering world cared to tell the rest of the world.)

Meaning... You could theoretically build a computer out of your own neurons and then program them.

My guess, 10,000x the cost on CL1. Even with the tech perfected, bio neurons fire much much slower than logic gates and electricity in a circuit board. If you have an ASIC (custom built board that isn't really using a CPU), the ASIC would be much much faster for deterministic calculations at high speed with an active cooling system.

Bio neurons are great at self-organizing. If you already know how they need to be organized (e.g. a hashing algorithm), and you need max-speed output there's no real advantage.

It's not wrong to say bio neurons are power efficient, its just that power efficiency depends on what the activity is.

I'll ask them, I happen to see them in a zoom meeting occasionally.

I very very very much doubt its a new machine, however you might need to send your machine back to get it refilled as I imagine there is a precise integration between bio neurons and electrical hardware.