Breakthrough: Fly Brain Emulation Moves a Body for the First Time

LONDON / SAN FRANCISCO — Until now, the Singularity has belonged exclusively to artificial intelligence. Today, Eon Systems PBC has released video evidence of what it calls the first full brain emulation that controls a body.

In 2024, Eon senior scientist Philip Shiu and colleagues published a computational model of the adult fruit fly brain (125,000 neurons, 50 million synapses) in Nature. The model predicted behavior with 95% accuracy — but it had no body. Its motor commands had nowhere to go.

Now they do. By combining its own connectome-based brain emulation, the NeuroMechFly v2 framework, and the MuJoCo physics simulator, Eon has created a virtual fly whose brain is a literal copy of a biological connectome. Sensory signals flow into the emulated brain, neural activity propagates through every connection, and the body begins to move.

The authors emphasize: this is not an animation, nor is it reinforcement learning (as in DeepMind’s recent work). It is the output of a biological copy.

“This is a qualitative threshold,” Eon states. “Projects like OpenWorm (a nematode with 302 neurons) are too primitive. Our competitors used RL, not real neural dynamics.”

Next target: the mouse

A mouse brain contains roughly 70 million neurons — 560 times the fly’s count. Eon is already amassing the data needed to emulate it, combining expansion microscopy with thousands of hours of calcium and voltage imaging.

“For the mouse, the question becomes one of scale, not of kind,” the company concludes.

Bottom line

The authors of The Innermost Loop end with a metaphor: “The ghost is no longer in the machine. The machine is becoming the ghost.” Eon is scaling its team for the next stage and invites followers to learn more at eon.systems.