Brain organoids are a way to quickly get functional/morphological significance readouts of intelligence-related genes (or genes related to other functions), so they are useful as a way of studying intelligence.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1148127/full
As a huge, huge moonshot, one could investigate avian brain organoids as an alternative substrate for intelligence (they are way more space-efficient than mammalian brains, and potentially could do way more compute in a small (manageable) volume if appropriately cultured and unbounded...
I am personally not convinced of their usefulness, Robert Long has an alternative take here.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that
I'd love to see an actual explanation for how brain-computer interfaces would be useful for alignment.
Additionally, I object to "AI alignment is difficult because AI models would struggle to understand human values". Under my best understanding, AI alignment is about making cognition aimable at all.