Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

A Drosophila melanogaster has about 135k neurons, and we only managed to reconstruct its connectome in 2023.

The human brain has 86 billion neurons, about 1 million times more. Therefore, it is obvious that we are very very far away from a full connectome.

Instead however, we could look at larger scales of connectome, and then try from that to extract modules, and then reverse engineer things module by module.

This is likely how we are going to "understand how the human brain works".

Some notable connectomes:

It is a bit hard to decide if those people are serious or not. Sometimes it feels scammy, but sometimes it feels fun and right!

Particularly concerning is the fact that they are not a not-for-profit entity, and it is hard to understand how they might make money.

Charles Simon, the founder, is pretty focused in how natural neurons work vs artificial neural network models. He has some good explanations of that, and one major focus of the project is their semi open source spiking neuron simulator BrainSimII. While Ciro Santilli believes that there might be insight in that, he also has doubts if certain modules of the brain wouldn't be more suitable coded directly in regular programming languages with greater ease and performance.

FutureAI appears to be Charles' retirement for fun project, he is likely independently wealthy. Well done.