AI may not be so superintelligent after all.
The lowly fruit fly just beat one of the world’s most advanced AI models at chess.
That’s just one of dozens of wild experiments that have gone viral since scientists fully mapped the neural pathways of an adult male fruit fly — whose entire brain fits on the head of a pin — and posted the data online.
The fly figured out ways to solve and compress chess that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend. I had to stop training it because it was destroying Opus 5. Demo and model available on @huggingface pic.twitter.com/twV5GlsGDC
— Maxime Labonne (@maximelabonne) September 17, 2026
The threshold-crossing technology, achieved by HHMI Janelia Research in Virginia and Google Research, catalogued all 166,000 individual neurons and 25.6 million connections in the fly’s brain and made it downloadable on Sept 3.
Inventive nerds then used the digitized neural network to power and navigate a wide variety of contraptions, apps and games.
Creator Maxime Labonne hooked the mapped pathways up to a chess engine and pitted it against Claude Opus 5, which is one of the most advanced AI models on the market.
The fly delivered a checkmate in just 11 moves.
One engineer created a project called Stonkfly — giving the entity a $100 portfolio and creating a way for it to trade crypto currency.
The program simulated dopamine rushes for the fly when it made money on a trade for positive reinforcement.
I put a real fruit fly’s brain in a fighting game
166,700 neurons wired exactly like the male fly connectome that Google & @HHMIJanelia just released. No training. It chases its opponent using the same circuit male flies use to chase females. https://t.co/EBX29IVQCD pic.twitter.com/EbZFHhb7oI
— alextitonis (@alextitonis) September 11, 2026
A Stanford student created a fighting game where she controlled one digital fly and the neural network controlled another digital fruit fly — and battled it in a king-of-the-hill style competition.
She lost all 12 bouts.
The fly has also hit the casino in a program called FlyJack. One engineer created a blackjack game for the fly-brain bets against a dealer.
But the fly’s success varies — like all gamblers — each time you run the experiment.
Other users plugged the neural network into a variety of homemade robots, such as animatronic cats, crab-like walkers, and small drones.
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