A complete digital copy of a fruit fly’s brain is uploaded into a simulated environment and can be seen displaying natural behavior.
A Silicon Valley startup has announced what it describes as a first “Multiple Behavioral Brain Uploads”. After creating a complete digital replica of a fruit fly’s brain, it controls a virtual body in an artificial environment.
The feat, unveiled by Ion Systems last week, represents a significant leap beyond traditional AI.
Unlike AI systems that learn behaviors through training, the virtual fly’s actions for walking, grooming, and feeding itself entirely emerge from a neuron-by-neuron copy of a real biological brain.
“It’s not animation. It’s not reinforcement learning that mimics biology.” Ian Co-Founder Dr. Alex Wisner-Gross said in a social media post announcing the development. “It’s a replica of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, moving in simulation, making body movements.”
This achievement builds on landmark research from 2024, when an international collaboration mapped the entire connectome of an adult fruit fly – its roughly 140,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections. A computational model built from this wiring diagram can predict actual fly motor behavior with 95% accuracy, says Ian senior scientist Philip Shiu, who co-authored the Nature paper.
However, the model was a brain without a body to effectively command. Eon has now closed the loop by combining a digital brain with a physics-simulated fly body using Google DeepMind’s MuJoCo engine.
Sensory input from the virtual environment flows into the simulated brain, neural activity propagates through its entire connectome, and motor commands drive the movement of the simulated body. A digital organism’s behaviors arise from its own circuit dynamics rather than from programmed instructions.
Using Connectome’s wiring, simple neuron models, and just an uploaded fly achieves 91% behavioral accuracy, Eon CEO Michael Andreg said. “No hand-tuning, no additional learning algorithms.”
The Eon team is now collecting data to attempt an emulation of the entire mouse brain — roughly 70 million neurons, 560 times the scale of flies. Beyond that, the team aims to eventually try uploading a whole human brain.
“The ghost is no longer in the machine. The machine is becoming a ghost.” Wisner-Gross said.
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