the first whole-brain emulation that actually does something

This article blew up today posted about brain emulation. and honestly this might be one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while.

what they actually did

They gave a fly a body. They integrated the connectome-based brain emulation with a physics simulated fly body. Sensory input goes in, neural activity propagates through the complete connectome, motor commands come out, and the simulated body actually moves.

It's kinda crazy to think about where this can go, first they'll scale up to a mouse, and after the mouse, the goal is human-scale emulation.

the thought that won't leave my head

I know nothing about neuroscience or connectomics. But:

If we eventually emulate human brains, could you take the brains of the smartest people on earth, pair each one with the full knowledge base of a modern LLM, then run millions of those simulations in parallel and just see what they come up with?

Imagine running a million copies of some brilliant physicist, each one with instant access to the entirety of human knowledge, each running at whatever speed the hardware allows, each exploring a slightly different direction. actual human cognition, copied and scaled.

Singularity is near.