Overview
- Eon Systems released a viral video of a virtual fruit fly that groomed its antennae and ate digital banana slices, which the company says were driven by a full brain model rather than scripted animation.
- The model uses a mapped fruit fly connectome of about 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses built from electron microscopy, paired with an AI system that Eon says matches real neuron firing with 95% accuracy.
- Eon frames the result as an early step toward mind uploading and says it plans to model an entire mouse brain of roughly 70 million neurons within two years, with a long‑term goal of simulating a human brain.
- Neuroscientists Karl Friston and Anil Seth dispute that a faithful simulation would be conscious and warn that human‑scale modeling faces shifting synapses and sheer size that could defy full replication.
- Reporters note possible practical gains for research, since running brain models like software could speed experiments, though past efforts such as Princeton’s nine‑year map of a mouse visual system show how hard scaling remains.