Meet PitchFlyWIRED has hired a new editorial staff member.
The 165,112 neuronal connections are all programmed to create story ideas. Here’s a sample of some of his earlier work: “The Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance”; “The Engineers Who Think Elon Musk Needs Less Computer Security”And my favorite? “Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump.”
PitchFly is a software that uses the a detailed map of the brain of a male drosophila—the common fruit fly. The map was developed by Google researchers and academics to capture the firing patterns of 166,000 synapses and 125,000,000 neurons in response stimuli. In essence, you can use it to simulate how a fly would respond to lots of stuff—it’s a very simple version of artificial intelligence based on charting real biological intelligence.
Researchers are able to provide a better understanding of the world. open-sourced it, You can use AI easily to import the Connectome into a Project with just a few prompts. PitchFly asked me to vibe code a project where the digital drosophila’s brain generated story ideas. The fly looks cool, even though I’m not certain why it wears a hat. It involved scraping hundreds of headlines for the top stories from the website over the last year, and then feeding them to the connectome. Codex was given the task of doing the work. Codex decided it would be most effective to convert the headlines and words/phrases into representations that a neural net could comprehend. Connectome was told the stories that performed best and to come up with its own ideas.
In other words, this isn’t a fly-based language model—although someone apparently created one of those. The fly brain doesn’t understand what these words mean or even if they are coherent. It is simply remixing patterns in new, pleasing ways. A cynic might suggest this is exactly how some journalists generate their own pitches, but I think that’s a bit unfair—and judging by its lunatic ideas, PitchFly won’t be replacing me anytime soon:
- Food and Drink Rules are Being Rewritten by a Tiny Shift of Agentic AI
- Security News is quietly affecting Donald Trump
- It’s time to reinvent privacy before artificial intelligence breaks.
- China about to make digital syndication obsolete?
In the future I might have it continue learning by reading the latest WIRED headlines. This is a good proof-of-concept, and it shows that WIRED writers are intellectually superior than fruit flies.
Upon the release of the Connectome in early September dozens of other weird and wonderful projects Fruit-fly intelligence powered the emergence.
Lyra bubbles, a user of X, demonstrated a project that included training the fly’s virtual brain. to play VR Game Beat Saber. Alex Wormuth created Coinbase as a software engineer. StonkFlyIt uses a fly’s brain to make decisions about how to invest in stocks. It’s not making money but is doing well considering the circumstances.
“The fly brings lighthearted, humorous relief” Wormuth, in a DM to me, said that everyone was worried about AI’s existential risk. He also found the idea of playing around with the connectomes for fruit flies to be fascinating. “It sparks questions about ethics of this and whether there is any consciousness [in the replication of fly’s brain],” He says.
