A computer that thinks like a brain. The breakthrough that can change medicine and AI

Darwin Monkey – A Computer that Thinks like a Brain

On August 2, 2025, researchers from China unveiled a new-generation invention: Darwin Monkey. It’s a computer inspired by a monkey’s brain. It’s the world’s first neuromorphic hardware (mimicking the brain’s operation and structure). It is based on dedicated neuromorphic chips and equipped with over 2 billion neurons. This allows it to emulate the brain of a macaque, a monkey from the Old World family.

Darwin Monkey, also known as Wukong, was developed by the State Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence at Zhejiang University in eastern China. Its parameters are impressive.

“The chip system supports over 2 billion pulsing neurons and more than 100 billion synapses, making Darwin Monkey the world’s first brain-like computer that combines advanced cognitive abilities with vision, hearing, language, and learning. Under typical operating conditions, it consumes about 2,000 watts of power,” according to English.news.cn.

The computer, inspired by a monkey’s brain, dominates over others. It has 960 Darwin 3 neuromorphic computing chips—the third generation of brain-inspired neural processors. This forms 15 brain-like servers in the form of so-called “blades.”

A single chip simulates over 2.35 million artificial neurons, connecting them in hundreds of millions of ways. It also has special instructions that help it think similarly to a brain and learn in real time, just like we do. This gives it a wide range of applications.

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What Will the Monkey Brain-Inspired Computer Be Used For?

The superintelligent Darwin Monkey computer not only learns and thinks like a human but also has its own equivalents of senses: sight, hearing, and language skills. Thanks to its power, it can run a large, brain-like model for Deep Seek—for in-depth information retrieval and processing, as well as problem-solving. It will contribute to:

• logical thinking,
• content generation,
• solving mathematical problems,
• preliminary simulation of animal brains with varying numbers of neurons.

For the last function, it uses mice, macaques, aquarium fish, and nematodes. This type of scientific work opens new possibilities for mechanical brain research without the need for biological experiments.

“Due to its features such as large scale, high level of parallelism, and low power consumption, Wukong offers a new computing paradigm for current processing scenarios,” explained Pan Gang, head of the research team and director of the State Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence at Zhejiang University, in an interview with Globaltimes.cn.

In the future, the monkey brain-inspired computer will provide significant support for artificial intelligence research.

Read the original article: Powstał komputer myślący jak mózg. To przełom w medycynie i AI