GoKawiilis a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.
Last week, a few posts about a so-called virtual “embodied fly” tore through X, boosted by AI hype accounts and excited commenters who didn’t seem to understand what it was they were excited about.
The videos came from San Francisco-based Eon Systems, which says it’s working toward “digital human intelligence” and claims it wants to build a full digital emulation of a mouse brain within the next two years — a timeline that is, to put it generously, ambitious. Cofounder Alexander Wissner-Gross shared the original clip publicly, calling it the “world’s first embodiment of a whole-brain emulation that produces multiple behaviors” and hinting at an impending technological singularity. CEO Michael Andregg posted a different cut, describing it as a “real uploaded animal.”
And that was it for proof: no detailed methods, no scientific paper, no independent verification, just videos of what looks like a digital fly walking around, eating, and rubbing its legs together.
We've uploaded a fruit fly. We took the @FlyWireNews connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model (@Philip_Shiu Nature 2024) and used it to control a MuJoCo physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action.
A few things I want to… pic.twitter.com/Qnlu3INs33 — Michael Andregg (@michaelandregg) March 8, 2026
“This is, in our view, a real uploaded animal.”
The internet was abuzz. The evidence was still two short videos on X. If you’re going to tell the world you’ve just hit what would be one of the most significant scientific milestones in human history, you better come with receipts.
Andregg attempted to provide some clarity on X in a thread that was part grab bag of caveats, part vaguely-described scientific terms, and part concrete-sounding numbers like “91% behavior accuracy.” I’ve sat with that metric for a while, and I still don’t really know what it’s supposed to mean, and I spent a good chunk of my master’s degree studying animal behavior. Nevertheless, he insisted that “this is, in our view, a real uploaded animal.”
... continue reading