An open-source simulation of a fruit fly brain can now generate strange technology story ideas. WIRED built PitchFly by combining its past headlines with a connectome, a detailed map showing how roughly 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses in a male fruit fly respond to stimuli.
The system is not a language model and does not understand the words it produces. A coding agent converted headline fragments into representations the simulated neural network could process, then used the connectome to remix patterns found in successful stories. The results are often absurd, which is part of the experiment’s appeal.
Other developers have connected the same biological map to games including Beat Saber, Doom, Minecraft and Pong, as well as a simulated stock trader. WIRED notes that it did not verify every online demo, and some may be jokes rather than genuine uses of the connectome.
The more serious value lies in making a complex scientific resource easier to explore. Small-animal brain maps let neuroscientists test ideas about circuitry and damage at a scale that is not yet possible for the human brain’s roughly 86 billion neurons. Coding agents lower the barrier to prototyping with those datasets, but a whimsical output should not be mistaken for evidence that the simulated fly understands its task.