Weekly News #33 | Updates Worth Your Attention

A Fruit Fly’s Brain Was Brought to Life in a Simulation

This week’s eerie development comes from the Eon Systems team, which digitally recreated the brain of a fruit fly – about 140,000 neurons – and used it to control a simulated body in a virtual environment.
We’re talking about a simulation where the virtual fly can move toward food, pause to clean dust accumulating on its body, groom itself with its front legs, and escape obstacles by flying away.

EON Systems → | X/Michael Andregg →

Yann LeCun’s Vision for “Real AI” That Interacts With the Real World

French machine learning researcher Yann LeCun, known for his strong claims that language models will never reach human-level intelligence, has launched a new startup backed by a record $1.02 billion seed investment.
The startup will focus on world models and AI systems that interact with the physical world, built around JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture) – a methodology LeCun previously contributed to in the research literature.

X/Amilabs →

Meta Acquires Moltbook, the Social Network for AI Assistants

Meta has acquired Moltbook, a social network where AI assistants communicate with each other. The platform initially went viral after a tweet by Andrej Karpathy, but it later drew attention due to security vulnerabilities and large numbers of fake posts.

Meta hasn’t explained the reason behind the acquisition yet. But one possible interpretation is this: As AI assistants begin generating a large portion of internet traffic, Meta may see a new advertising opportunity. If assistants are already asking each other questions to complete their users’ tasks, companies may want to influence consumption directly inside those assistant-to-assistant interactions.

TechCrunch →