Alan Rainy

A fly that died years ago is flying around a harbor that doesn't exist. Here's what's going on. Scientists took one female fruit fly and sliced its brain into about 7,000 pieces, each roughly 2,000 times thinner than a human hair. They photographed those slices 21 million times under an electron microscope. Then hundreds of people spent years tracing every connection by hand until they had the whole thing, all 139,255 neurons and 54.5 million synapses. That map is called FlyWire. Odyssey hasn't said exactly which map it used, but FlyWire is the one most of these projects build on. Earlier this year a startup called Eon ran that map as a simulation with zero training and got a virtual fly that walks and grooms on its own. Now Odyssey has put the brain somewhere new. The harbor in this clip isn't sitting on a server as a 3D model or a game level. Odyssey-3 is a 14-billion-parameter AI that learned how water and light behave by watching a ton of video, and it invents each frame as the fly steers through it. This is kind of a big deal for a nerdy reason. For as long as people have tried to build a mind, there have been two camps. One says copy a real brain. The other says train a giant model on tons of data. Those camps have mostly fought each other, and in this clip one is living inside the other. And here's a fun bit of math. The fly has 54.5 million synapses. The AI dreaming up its world has 14 billion parameters. Line those up and the world is about 250 times bigger than the brain living in it. That's what happens when one approach rides on GPUs and the other rides on grad students with microscopes. The trained side ballooned in a couple of years. The copied side took the better part of a decade to get one fly. What really got me is how little it takes to fool a fly. A fruit fly sees through about 800 tiny lenses per eye, so its whole view of the world is around 1,600 pixels. Each of your eyes sends about a million nerve fibers to your brain. Keeping a fly convinced means the AI only has to look right across 1,600 pixels, which is a pretty low bar, and it's clearing it. The fake world will look good enough for human eyes long before anybody can slice up a human brain and rebuild all 86 billion neurons.