From WIRED · Will Knight · · 2m
A Fruit Fly's Brain Generates Story Ideas
Researchers open-sourced a fruit fly's connectome, and creative coders are building wild AI projects with it.
In brief
Researchers open-sourced a fruit fly's connectome, and creative coders are building wild AI projects with it. A fruit fly's 165,000 neurons can be trained to do surprisingly useful tasks, showing that you don't need massive AI models to solve specific problems. Originally reported by WIRED.
Quick answers
- What is a connectome?
- Google and academic researchers mapped a fruit fly's brain, capturing 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses. This connectome shows how the fly's brain responds to stimuli, creating a simple biological AI model.
- What is the key takeaway from A Fruit Fly's Brain Generates Story Ideas?
- A fruit fly's 165,000 neurons can be trained to do surprisingly useful tasks, showing that you don't need massive AI models to solve specific problems.
Meet PitchFly, the fly editor
WIRED trained a fruit fly's brain to generate story ideas. Early pitches include "The Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance" and "Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump."
“"Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump."”
What is a connectome?
Google and academic researchers mapped a fruit fly's brain, capturing 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses. This connectome shows how the fly's brain responds to stimuli, creating a simple biological AI model.
How PitchFly was built
The creator scraped WIRED's most popular headlines from the past year and fed them into the fly's connectome. The AI converted headlines into patterns the neural network could understand, then generated new story ideas based on what it learned.
The fly brain remixes, not understands
PitchFly doesn't actually understand language. It remixes patterns from headlines in new ways, similar to how some language models work. The fly has no idea what the words mean or if the ideas make sense.
Weird projects using fly brains
Since the connectome was open-sourced in September, developers created projects training the fly to play Beat Saber, trade stocks, play Doom and Minecraft, solve Rubik's cubes, and drive virtual cars. Flies turned out to be terrible at parallel parking.
Why this matters for science
Mapping animal brains helps neuroscientists understand intelligence. Scientists can test theories about how brain damage affects neural wiring and explore potential repairs using the fly's connectome.
Tiny brains, big possibilities
The fruit fly project shows how easy it is now to train specialized AI models for specific tasks. Sometimes a tiny brain can do quite well, and you don't need massive language models from big tech companies.
The main idea
A fruit fly's 165,000 neurons can be trained to do surprisingly useful tasks, showing that you don't need massive AI models to solve specific problems.
