Meet PitchFly, WIRED’s latest editorial recruit. He has 165,112 neurons, trained to generate story ideas. Early outputs include “The Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance” and “Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump.”
The fly brain uses a detailed map of a male drosophila’s brain, developed by researchers from Google and academic institutions. This connects 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses, allowing it to simulate a fly’s response to stimuli. AI was used to feed WIRED headlines into the connectome, creating ideas based on patterns seen in top-performing stories.
PitchFly’s proposals, while creative, are also a bit bonkers. Suggestions like “The Tiny Shift in Agentic AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Food and Drink” highlight the unpredictable nature of such projects. Other experiments involve training the fly brain to play games, drive cars, and even trade stocks.
While fun, these projects showcase the ease with which small AI models can be created for specific tasks. They also hint at the potential and limitations of mapping different animal brains, including the possibility of understanding the biological foundations of intelligence.
