Deconstructing the viral fly connectome sims: cutting 90% hype, cool questions remain
patrickmineault · x · 2026-09-16
After HHMI Janelia released the male fly CNS connectome (with segmentation support from Google), X filled with viral demos: a fly brain playing Beat Saber, running Doom, controlling robots. NeuroAI blogger Patrick Mineault's "Deconstructing viral fly sims" pours cold water:
- Most demos aren't "real": of the ones with findable source, few demonstrate a full sensation-to-motor loop — the Beat Saber author admitted it was overtrained on one track, doesn't generalize, and barely uses visual input.
- Other projects just train a very flexible policy on top of the connectome.
- David Klindt's TL;DR: cut 90% of the PR hype and there are cool research questions underneath; synapses have "weights" and neurons are particular — releasing only the connection graph of a modern LLM would be a joke, not a functional system.
- No flies were uploaded, virtual fly brains aren't conscious, and there is no fly Torment Nexus; the frenzy also spawned memecoins and Roko's Basilisk-style unease.
Related event: Fly connectome demos go viral, neuroscientists push back(5 posts)→
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