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Artificial intelligence seeks to emulate the faculties of the human mind through computational systems, a synthetic recreation of our brains’ capabilities to perceive, learn, and reason.
Now, a company claims to have taken a totally different tack by simulating the 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections of an adult fruit fly’s brain — and then letting it roam inside a Matrix-like virtual environment.
In a video shared by Eon Systems cofounder Alex Weissner-Gross, the crudely animated insect can be seen stretching its legs inside a simulated sandbox, rubbing its front feet together and using its labellum to drink from a small bowl.
“For decades, whole-brain emulation has been the tantalizing counterpart to artificial intelligence,” Weissner-Gross wrote in a Substack post. “Copy a biological brain, neuron by neuron and synapse by synapse, and run it.”
The First Multi-Behavior Brain Upload
It’s a simple demonstration with larger implications, according to its creators.
Weissner-Gross claimed the video demonstrates what the company believes is the “world’s first embodiment of a whole-brain emulation that produces multiple behaviors.”
The experiment builds on research by Eon senior scientist Philip Shiu and his colleagues, which was published in the journal Nature in 2024. At the time, the researchers said they had created a complete computational model of the entire fruit fly brain to “study circuit properties of feeding and grooming behaviors.”
The team used the pre-existing FlyWire connectome, a Princeton-led effort to create a complete wiring diagram of a fruit fly brain.
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