“No, we haven’t uploaded a fly yet” by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly. It started with a video released by the startup Eon Systems, a company that wants to create “Brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence.”

On the left of the video, a virtual fly walks around in a sandpit looking for pieces of banana to eat, occasionally pausing to groom itself along the way. On the right is a dancing constellation of dots resembling the fruit fly brain, set above the caption ‘simultaneous brain emulation’.

At first glance, this appears astounding - a digitally recreated animal living its life inside a computer. And indeed, this impression was seemingly confirmed when, a couple of days after the video's initial release on X by cofounder Alex Wissner-Gross, Eon's CEO Michael Andregg explicitly posted “We’ve uploaded a fruit fly”.

Yet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just cool visuals”, as one neuroscientist put it in response to Andregg's post. If Eon had indeed succeeded in uploading a fly - a goal previously thought to be likely decades away according to much of the fly neuroscience community - they’d [...]

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Outline:

(03:43) A brief history of fruit fly connectomics

(06:10) So, what did Eon actually do?

(10:39) What would actually count as uploading a fly?

(14:08) Still loading

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First published:
March 19th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwcxBRrsKavJB9Wz/no-we-haven-t-uploaded-a-fly-yet

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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