A fly is living inside AI

PLUS: 30 months on the exponential (in charts)

Author

Barsee
21 Oct

Together with

howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy wednesday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

  • Odyssey put a fruit fly brain inside an AI-generated world

  • The last 30 months of AI development

  • Can AI pay for itself?

  • Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

ATLASSIAN

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THROUGH THE VALLEY

Odyssey put a fruit fly brain inside an AI-generated world - and now the lil guy is flying around harbors, marinas and markets that don't actually exist, with Odyssey-3 generating the scenery in real time as it moves. A dead fly exploring a world that was never real. Quite a sentence. (demo)

The brain comes from FlyWire's 2024 mapping of an adult fruit fly's ~139k neurons and 50M synapses. Earlier this year, Eon Systems connected a simulated version to a virtual fly that could walk, groom itself and respond to sugar. Odyssey has now taken the idea into a generative world rather than a traditional physics simulator.

Before we get too excited about uploading brains to the Matrix, it's not quite that. The neural simulation is simplified, some movements rely on prebuilt controllers, and Odyssey hasn't shared much about how the fly actually sees or controls its new world. The demo mostly shows a camera moving through AI-generated scenery.

Still, I love this sort of experiment. We've got one AI dreaming up an entire world and a simulation of a real animal's brain wandering around inside it. Odyssey even called it a “really dumb fruit fly”, which seems a little harsh considering the guy's only been alive digitally for five minutes.

I'd love to see what happens when they give it proper vision, smell and a body. Or put another fly in there. Surely the lil guy deserves some company.

TRENDING TOOLS

  • SKY-001 - the first Engineering World Model. On CAD and BIM tasks, it beats GPT-6 Astra and every frontier model

  • Idealab.ai - AI-powered database of 1.2M startup ideas

  • Eleven Realtime - ElevenLabs’ fastest voice agents. It listens, thinks and replies in under half a second

  • ChatGPT - it can now take over your Chrome tabs

  • Town - a personal AI assistants that team up across your whole company

  • Glimpse - the first visual thinking model with competitive frontier performance compared to Astra

  • Perplexity Computer - it runs fully locally on Mac: works across private files and native apps with AI that stays on your device

  • Voxtral 3 - state-of-the-art Transcribe and Speech models powering Mistral’s new voice agents API

  • FLUX 3 Max - it turns a text prompt or still image into a 5- to 20-second video with audio

  • Wally - it turns your spoken or typed rough ideas into an editable draft in your own tone, and learns your style over time

  • Exa 3.0 - the company's latest model with its "largest ever improvement to search quality."

  • Maali - a personal finance app for Mac and Windows that keeps your bank data on your computer and explores your spending

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

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