Have a look at this comment from Ken Hayworth, a highly respected scientist in the field, which I am copying here from a twitter post by him (https://x.com/KennethHayworth/status/2032604687212392562). I also just came back from the Cosyne 2026 conference, and the work was unfortunately not met with great enthusiasm, despite the media attention: My statement regarding the misleading EON Systems “fly upload” video:
The hundreds of researchers who make up the Drosophila neuroscience community are making good progress toward eventually understanding how the intelligent behaviors of a fruit fly are produced by computations in its neural circuits. Obtaining the structural connectome of the fly brain and ventral nerve cord was a significant milestone in that quest, as was obtaining an estimate of neurotransmitter types for each cell type. What is currently most lacking is a catalog of the precise electrophysiological and molecular dynamics of each neuron and synapse type. Dozens of on-going electrophysiological, genetic, and behavioral experiments are beginning to fill in those details. But completing that task will likely take many years, possibly decades, of more research. At the end of that long road, I have no doubt, there will be a detailed paper, published in a high-quality journal with full details and carefully peer-reviewed, which will at long last make the true statement “we’ve uploaded a fruit fly”. And that future paper will have a supplementary video much like the EON Systems one, showing a fly navigating a virtual environment. But, unlike the misleading EON Systems video, that future video will be real… all 100,000+ neurons displaying dynamics that reflect those that would occur in the real fly engaged in the same sensory-motor behaviors. That paper will represent the crowning achievement of a successful Drosophila neuroscience field.
What EON Systems’ misleading video and claim has done today is to try to steal that future victory and take its valor for their own, all in the hopes of raising some cash from naive investors who think they might get to human uploads soon, and all while riding a tide of hype they generated in the gullible public. The result has been a wave of secondary reporting that grossly mischaracterizes the current state of neuroscience progress, implying that it is much further along than it currently is.
As a member of the Drosophila research community, and as a long-term advocate of brain preservation for eventual mind uploading, I feel it is my responsibility to call out this reprehensible behavior. Neuroscience technology is progressing fast enough that we are now able to obtain structural connectomes of small organisms like the fruit fly. But neuroscience understanding is progressing much more slowly. True uploading, even for a fruit fly, is likely years to decades away. Even obtaining a mouse connectome seems likely to be a decade or more away. Human uploading is simply not on any reasonable research or investment timeline, unless such a timeline includes many decades of methodical basic neuroscience research. Of course, we can preserve human brains today using aldehyde fixatives as is done in all of today’s connectomics studies. But we will not be able to upload a human brain for many decades, perhaps centuries to come.
Please do not let today’s real scientific progress in connectomics and brain preservation be drowned out by misleading hype.
This seems petty. Basically he's annoyed that a commercial entity made a video based on published research rather than an academic group.
As far as I can tell the blog post does a good job of citing sources - they go over and above what a commercial entity is required to disclose (I.e. nothing). No good deed goes unpunished.
I thought the whole point of academia was to do research for the benefit of society. Research is published so that society can make use of it. Not to give academics "thunder".
If you don't want anyone to read your papers there's a simple solution: don't publish them.
Look at it from Ken's perspective though. He's one of the few people who have moved this field forward by solving very hard problems over decades.
Now a startup comes in and publishes a cool video that claims to solve a big chunk of what he wants to do / contribute to over the rest of his career, like "hey that was easy!".
He says the video is very misleading, and that's just a fact.
It's hard to see for someone outside of this how insulting that can feel to someone in his position, and that's why it can come across as petty.
Also, your summary of his criticism isn't quite right, read it more carefully. It would apply equally if an academic group had done that. It's more a case of academic standards for communication meeting silicon valley bluster.
Petty? He's accusing them of fraud, and if he's right then yeah we should all be disappointed in Eon's deceptive marketing.
Fully simulating a drosophila has been a high goal for a very long time and great claims require great proof, but Eon has been stingy with the details (and no this blog post does not reveal much beyond chaining together lots of impressive sounding words).
Imagine the skepticism on HN if someone declared they invented AGI. Similar level claim.
Great idea; I just picked IMAP because I thought it'd be somewhat universal. I hadn't heard of JMAP before. It should be quite straightforward to integrate. FastMail actually also seems to support IMAP.
I got tired of “email archaeology”; digging through years of inboxes to find something I know is in there.
So I built NeuralMail: a fully open-source tool that makes your email (IMAP accounts) searchable with LLMs. It’s not an email client, just a way to extract and query info, no fuss.
Works with any IMAP provider (Gmail, Outlook, etc.), no lock-in.
Searches across multiple accounts at once
Handles 10k–100k+ emails, even attachments
Lets you plug in any LLM (local or API) so you can choose between privacy vs performance
Originally a weekend project (started CLI-only), but after a few months of use it’s become indispensable for me.
Very interesting comment, not because I agree with it, but I think it exposes a classic left vs right wing problem, and that the attitude is applied universally instead of selectively. IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
> IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
That's rather odd, because if anything I'd say the opposite is best - you can trust your ingroup to have similar values to you, and thus can afford to forgive them/be generous without being taken advantage of. On the other hand, outgroups WON'T share your values, and being more generous to them than to the ingroup is just self destructive.
And I would have thought both of those were common sense, too.
It's interesting, looking at chimps and bonobos it appears that both of those general strategies is employable, with bonobos being stranger friendly and chimps being stranger averse: https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/bonobos-meal-sharing/. Not exactly the same as what is being talked about here, but doesn't seem far off - note the mention even of bonobos preferentially sharing with strangers over friends and family.
Well, I think my optimum is just a hypothetical high-trust society in which everyone strives to be self-sufficient but gets supported in case of failure by others. Of course, this is not how the world works, which is more what you are describing. I don't think that is best though, from the perspective of humanity.
> high-trust society in which everyone strives to be self-sufficient but gets supported in case of failure by others.
But that IS how the world works! Or at least how parts of it have worked and still work. Puritan settlements in the Americas, Mormon communities today, arguably the Nordic countries, other closely knit peoples and communities throughout history... It's just that that comes from favoring the ingroup, not the outgroup.
I think when you remove ingroup and outgroup and just keep the argument for the attitude toward yourself/others it becomes more obvious what I mean. Otherwise it really depends on where you draw the boundary for the ingroup (e.g. your close family)/outgroup (e.g. your neighbors) which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
I guess my view is that it's easier (and has fewer negative side effects) to get people to care about others by expanding their ingroup than by making them care about their outgroup.
Very interesting read. I interpret this in the way that clustering (eg HDBSCAN) on UMAP-projected data makes some sense at least (contrary to tSNE), are there any differing opinions on this? Interesting related discussions: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/263539/clustering-...
Basically, the answer is yes you can do this, but verify and analyze the output to ensure it makes sense (e.g. coloring points by known features/labels). For example, if you have a small number of points in the dataset (<1000), UMAP tends to display a dense cluster that is quite separated from the remaining data. However, this apparent cluster is spurious and contains noisy data points that UMAP couldn’t “figure out what to do with” (they are similar in their dissimilarity to the other data).
The recent NIH brain initiative report describes the acquisition of a synaptic resolution connectome of an entire mouse brain using massively parallel electron microscopy. The 5 year plan seems a bit too optimistic to me, especially due to remaining difficulties in staining technology, but if successful, the project will definitely transform neuroscience.
I guess that was the case, it all looks unflagged now. I'm really impressed with your work, one question, though. What do you believe are the biggest bottlenecks to speeding up your work? How soon could we see this applied to say, millimeter sized brains?
The Allen institute (see e.g. https://twitter.com/danbumbarger?lang=de) and also Jeff Lichtman (https://lichtmanlab.fas.harvard.edu/) are very close to having solved the data acquisition problem (using very fast TEMs or multi-beam SEM) for cubic mm sized volumes, and we (http://www.neuro.mpg.de/denk) are also working hard on it. On the analysis side (i.e. automatic reconstruction), I am actually optimistic that it is mainly a software engineering problem (scalability to Petabyte-sized volumes, use tailored machine learning for remaining problems, e.g. to identify reconstructions that make no sense) and not so much a fundamental algorithmic limitation problem anymore. So 2 years from now, we should see the first cubic mm reconstructions.
Just today they came out with the full image set of a fruit fly brain (http://temca2data.org/). Is the output of this something that could be fed through you algorithm, and if so, how long would that take?
The hundreds of researchers who make up the Drosophila neuroscience community are making good progress toward eventually understanding how the intelligent behaviors of a fruit fly are produced by computations in its neural circuits. Obtaining the structural connectome of the fly brain and ventral nerve cord was a significant milestone in that quest, as was obtaining an estimate of neurotransmitter types for each cell type. What is currently most lacking is a catalog of the precise electrophysiological and molecular dynamics of each neuron and synapse type. Dozens of on-going electrophysiological, genetic, and behavioral experiments are beginning to fill in those details. But completing that task will likely take many years, possibly decades, of more research. At the end of that long road, I have no doubt, there will be a detailed paper, published in a high-quality journal with full details and carefully peer-reviewed, which will at long last make the true statement “we’ve uploaded a fruit fly”. And that future paper will have a supplementary video much like the EON Systems one, showing a fly navigating a virtual environment. But, unlike the misleading EON Systems video, that future video will be real… all 100,000+ neurons displaying dynamics that reflect those that would occur in the real fly engaged in the same sensory-motor behaviors. That paper will represent the crowning achievement of a successful Drosophila neuroscience field.
What EON Systems’ misleading video and claim has done today is to try to steal that future victory and take its valor for their own, all in the hopes of raising some cash from naive investors who think they might get to human uploads soon, and all while riding a tide of hype they generated in the gullible public. The result has been a wave of secondary reporting that grossly mischaracterizes the current state of neuroscience progress, implying that it is much further along than it currently is.
As a member of the Drosophila research community, and as a long-term advocate of brain preservation for eventual mind uploading, I feel it is my responsibility to call out this reprehensible behavior. Neuroscience technology is progressing fast enough that we are now able to obtain structural connectomes of small organisms like the fruit fly. But neuroscience understanding is progressing much more slowly. True uploading, even for a fruit fly, is likely years to decades away. Even obtaining a mouse connectome seems likely to be a decade or more away. Human uploading is simply not on any reasonable research or investment timeline, unless such a timeline includes many decades of methodical basic neuroscience research. Of course, we can preserve human brains today using aldehyde fixatives as is done in all of today’s connectomics studies. But we will not be able to upload a human brain for many decades, perhaps centuries to come.
Please do not let today’s real scientific progress in connectomics and brain preservation be drowned out by misleading hype.
-Kenneth Hayworth
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