Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly. It started with a video released by the startup Eon Systems, a company that wants to create “Brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence.” On the left of the video, a virtual fly walks around in a sandpit looking for pieces of banana to eat, occasionally pausing to groom itself along the way. On the right is a dancing constellation of dots resembling the fruit fly brain, set above the caption ‘simultaneous brain emulation’. At first glance, this appears astounding - a digitally recreated animal living its life inside a computer. And indeed, this impression was seemingly confirmed when, a couple of days after the video’s initial release on X by cofounder Alex Wissner-Gross, Eon’s CEO Michael Andregg explicitly posted “We’ve uploaded a fruit fly”. Yet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just cool visuals”, as one neuroscientist put it in response to Andregg’s post. If Eon had indeed succeeded in uploading a fly - a goal previously thought to be likely decades away according to much of the fly neuroscience community - they’d need more than a video to prove it. Did the upload show evidence of known neurophysiological markers of working memory, such as the head-direction ring attractor bump? How did their brain model actually control the virtual fly body, given it seemed to lack a modeled spinal cord? Where was the data and the write-up? Because if Eon couldn’t back up what their video seemed to show, at least some neuroscientists were going to be markedly less than impressed: Eon did follow up with a blog post - How the Eon Team Produced A Virtual Embodied Fly - detailing how they combined pre-existing models of the fly brain and body into a system that could respond to virtual environmental cues. But for the neuroscientists scrutinising the uploading claim, these details only sharpened their obj