There is sooo much hype around this, when the Eon team did almost nothing new compared to the published research. (For context I did my PhD in a fly motor control lab and still follow this field. My colleagues are authors on the research papers Eon used.)

I want to highlight some limitations of the current state of research as well, based on questions that many neuroscientists in this field are struggling with.

- The movement of the legs is not modeled at a fine level, just whether fly is moving forward or turning. This is because we don't have great data on fly leg movements on all these situations, and ventral nerve connectome is still in progress

- By the way the brain connectome still has a lot of errors and needs more proofreading. Also the identity of many neurotransmitters and synaptic strength of connections is unknown. Many are identified through our knowledge of fly genetics which won't translate to humans. In current research, scientists add some finetuning to match some behavior to account for those unknowns.

- There's definitely fly behavior data at the level of making decisions, but not much at level of limb kinematics. Even where data is available, it's unclear how to evaluate the simulated fly against the data. How do you know you got it right?

When I saw the Eon announcement, I was curious how they tackled these challenges. Seems like they didn't. It looks like they forked a few research repositories and vibe coded something to combine them.

I'll give them props for the videos and marketing though, it's crazy to see so many people interested in this research field!!