The internet has a new favorite toy, and it is a flybrain scheme. Earlier this month, HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, Google Research, and their collaborators published research describing the first complete wiring diagram of an entire male fruit fly central nervous system. The dataset, MaleCNS v1.0, has been available since June 8. It maps more than 166,000 neurons spanning the central brain, optic lobes, and ventral nerve cord. Together with existing female connectomes, it enables what Janelia calls the first comprehensive, synaptic-resolution comparison across sexes in an adult animal with complex anatomy and behavior.
The interweb took this someplace else. On September 4, Evan Sinclair Smith, a computer science graduate student at Georgia Tech, shared a Minecraft demo built with a simulation of the fly’s neural wiring. He says GPT-6 Astra helped him build it. Millions of views followed. Other developers connected fly-brain simulations to Doom, Beat Saber, bitcoin trading, parallel parking, LinkedIn posts, and doner kebab cutting. Someone even built a virtual fruit fly heaven. 404 Media has a delightful tour.
Before we give the fly a driver’s license, a little context. A connectome is a wiring diagram. Making it do something requires additional software that determines how simulated neurons behave, what information they receive, and how their output translates into actions. Smith’s Minecraft project uses modeled neural activity to select and adjust scripted movements. The Doom project’s documentation explicitly says that getting better at the game remains unproven. Moving is one thing. Learning is another.
The memes also produced a useful lesson about AI-assisted science. Peter Wang and Nico Christie explored whether particular neuron groups could support navigation through rapid changes in synaptic strength. The initial posts sounded like a discovery. Then, Wang published a correction. Earlier researchers had already identified these neuron groups and investigated their roles. He acknowledged factual errors and attribution problems, and characterized the work as simulations of existing hypotheses.
Open scientific data and AI tools let more people ask questions, build experiments, and test ideas. They also make it remarkably easy to mistake something you’ve just learned for something you’ve just discovered. Knowing the difference still requires expertise.
One quick note about scale: a model based on 166,700 neurons can be connected to a video game by a graduate student. It represents the wiring of a complete central nervous system, but it does not reproduce everything that makes a fly a fly. The dataset includes predicted neurotransmitter identities, but it doesn’t recreate the animal’s full biochemistry. Importantly, these demonstrations in no way establish sentience or conscious perception.
The human brain has an estimated 86 billion neurons, roughly half a million times the count in this fly’s central nervous system, so nobody is uploading grandma (at least not this week), but a lot more people can now experiment with a nervous system’s wiring.
Every company needs a Claw strategy. Do you have one?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with AI strategy, implementation and governance, as well as technology, media and marketing. Named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices in Technology, he is a bestselling author, covers tech and business for Fox 5’s Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN, and writes the popular daily business blog Think About This. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.