AI lab Odyssey says it placed a fruit fly brain inside its Odyssey 3 world model and let it fly through imagined worlds
We placed the fruit fly brain inside Odyssey-3, a frontier world model. The lil’ guy is now flying around totally imagined, simulated worlds all by itself 🫶
Context
Pairing a simulated brain with a generated world is a striking demo, but without published methods it is hard to tell what the fly is actually doing.
This is a first hand post from Odyssey, an AI lab that builds world models. It has not published a paper, code or method, so it is not known which fly brain model was used or how the brain's activity steers the flight.
Deep dive
On October 17, Odyssey posted that it placed the fruit fly brain inside Odyssey 3, which it calls a frontier world model, and that the fly is now flying around totally imagined, simulated worlds all by itself.
The 30 second video shows scenes of a sunny harbor town, with boats, a waterfront promenade and stone buildings, moving as if seen in flight. An inset in the corner shows a 3D model of a fly, at first over a checkered floor and then against a white background. Odyssey describes itself as an AI lab building world models, systems that generate and simulate environments as they go.
The post passed 4.5 million views. Odyssey has not said which fly brain model it used, how the generated video is turned into input for the brain, or how the brain's output is turned into flight. Shaduf, a site that grades public claims about simulated fly brains, rated the Odyssey claim unverified on October 18 because no method, code or write up had been published.
Researchers have released complete wiring maps of the fruit fly brain, including a male fly map of about 166,000 neurons that Google Research described this year. A wiring map shows how neurons connect, but turning it into a working simulation that controls a body requires further modeling choices, which Odyssey has not described.
What to expect next
Watch whether Odyssey publishes a write up or code naming the fly brain model and explaining how it connects to the world model, which would let researchers check the claim.
Also watch whether other labs use world models as test environments for simulated brains or robots, since generated worlds could be a cheap way to train and test agents. Claims in this area are easy to overstate without measured results.