Cortical Labs built the CL1, a system that grows human neurons and connects them directly to a computer chip. Last week, someone wired it up to play Doom. As one person summarized it:

Someone said:

"We grew a human brain fused to a computer, sent it to a digital rendition of Hell, and gave it a gun"

A week later, the same organoid brain was used to control an LLM.

This situation raises an uncomfortable question: are these neurons conscious? Ethicists are going to have a rough time.

Sources: tweet, tweet, youtube video

Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross announces Eon Systems' breakthrough: the first whole-brain emulation of a fruit fly, using a 2024 Nature model's 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses to drive multiple behaviors in a MuJoCo-simulated body, closing the sensorimotor loop.

Unlike prior disembodied models or RL-based animations, this connectome-derived emulation produces naturalistic actions from biological wiring, marking a qualitative shift toward scalable brain engineering.

Replies highlight its validation of scaling insect brains to human-level intelligence for AGI, with Eon targeting mouse emulation next using expansion microscopy and imaging data for 70 million neurons. Sources: X Article

in a system where self-replication is possible, its optimization is inevitable

They capture the exact moment when a developing heart shifts from silence to its first beat. There is no “switch”: many cells gradually become active and, upon crossing a critical threshold, the entire tissue suddenly synchronizes.

Sources: heartbeat, self replicating system

One philosopher wrote 30,000 words that shaped every conversation you've ever had with Claude. Anthropic hired her to give their AI a soul.

Sources: tweet