The Biological Computing Co. Ships Its First Product, a Neuron-Informed Video Model
On fal, Mischief 1 is priced at $0.005 per second of generated video at 480p and $0.01 per second at 720p, which puts a five-second 480p clip at 2.5 cents. The Biological Computing Co. (TBC), a San Francisco startup, released the image-to-video model on October 30. TBC says it generates video five times faster than Wan 2.2, the open-weight Alibaba model it is built on, at matching quality and 80 percent lower inference cost. The two figures describe the same claim in different units, since a fifth of the GPU time removes four fifths of the GPU bill, as The Decoder pointed out. Listings are at fal.ai/models/TBC/mischief-1/image-to-video and openrouter.ai/tbc/mischief-1
TBC's public evidence for the speed claim is thin. The press release gives no hardware, resolution or quality metric, and Unite.AI noted the announcement offers no independent benchmark. Tao.media reports that TBC's product page shows average generation times of 142 seconds for Wan 2.2 and 12 seconds for Mischief 1, a ratio of roughly twelve to one by my arithmetic, well above the headline five times. The same page says real times vary. OpenRouter's listing shows a median end-to-end latency of 12.73 seconds on its single provider, with no Wan 2.2 figure beside it.
Wonder Studios, an AI creative studio, tested the model, and co-founder Justin Hackney said the speed and cost let the studio push its work further in the same time and budget. TBC told The AI Innovator that 100 five-second clips took about six minutes in that test. The company was founded by neurosurgeons Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec, and Fortune reported in February that it had raised a $25 million seed round.
What the neurons contributed
TBC grows cortical neurons on chips with 4,096 electrodes, stimulates them at chosen points, and records how activity spreads and fades. According to The Decoder, the Neural Dynamics Adapter encodes one rule from those recordings: activity acts mainly in its own neighborhood and then decays, which works as a damper that keeps neighboring image regions coherent. The adapter adds less than 0.1 percent to the base model's parameters and, once built, is a fixed mathematical transformation. Pomeraniec told The AI Innovator the neurons "stay completely in our lab," and that this was intentional.
The published test of that approach used a different model. On Oasis, an open Minecraft world model of about 600 million parameters, TBC reports the adapter scored about 19 percent better than the original on differential entropy across ten test videos, 15 percent better than fine-tuning of the same size, and 5 percent better than LoRA. The adapter had about 156,000 parameters. A follow-up version raised the frame rate from about two to just under ten per second, which TBC attributes to fewer compute steps per frame rather than to the adapter. All of these figures come from TBC's own blog posts. A July test by Bluesky Compute reported 4.4 times lower inference cost and more than three times as much coherent video, with few details published.
The Oasis results address washout, the progressive blurring of frames over a long generation. Nothing public shows the same effect for Wan 2.2, and The Decoder noted that TBC has not published a controlled comparison against distillation or caching on the same base model.
Where the neurons come from
TBC uses commercially sourced rat neurons and neurons derived from human stem cells, according to The AI Innovator. Tao.media, citing WIRED, reports the cultures grow on arrays made by the Swiss company 3Brain. Ksendzovsky told GamesBeat that the cells are alive but are not living beings. A listing for a Stanford talk puts TBC's cultures at 100,000 to 500,000 neurons.
The ethics arguments in the field center on human-derived cultures. A July Nature commentary said people who donate tissue for research may not know their cells end up in biocomputers. STAT reported on an Asilomar meeting where researchers, ethicists and legal experts discussed human neural organoids, which fall outside existing regulatory structures for research on humans or animals. Both address biocomputing in general, and neither excerpt reviewed for this article mentions TBC. TBC's FAQ states that video is generated by software and that no living cells are involved.
TBC says it is applying the same process to newer open-weight video models and has published no figures for those results. An AWS Marketplace listing for Mischief 1 is described as coming soon.
About the Author
David Borish is the author of The Tony Hawk Paradox: When Video Games Predict Reality and writes at davidborish.com
