The Singularity has belonged exclusively to artificial minds, until now. For decades, whole-brain emulation has been the tantalizing counterpart to artificial intelligence: copy a biological brain, neuron by neuron and synapse by synapse, and run it. Today, for the first time, I am releasing a video from a company I helped found, Eon Systems PBC, demonstrating what we believe is the world’s first embodiment of a whole-brain emulation that produces multiple behaviors.

In 2024, Eon senior scientist Philip Shiu and collaborators published in Nature a computational model of the entire adult Drosophila melanogaster brain, containing more than 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections, built from the FlyWire connectome and machine learning predictions of neurotransmitter identity. That model predicted motor behavior at 95% accuracy. But it was disembodied: a brain without a body, activation without physics, motor outputs with nowhere to go.

Now the brain has somewhere to go. Building on previous work, including Shiu et al.’s whole-brain computational model, the NeuroMechFly v2 embodied simulation framework, and Özdil et al.’s research on centralized brain networks underlying body part coordination, this demonstration integrates Eon’s connectome-based brain emulation with a physics-simulated fly body in MuJoCo. — Read More