The tiny brain of a fruit fly may have just offered a bizarre glimpse into the future of artificial intelligence.
A developer has successfully run a reconstructed map of all 166,700 neurons in a fruit fly’s brain inside Minecraft, using simulated neural activity to control the virtual insect’s movements.
The demonstration was built with the help of OpenAI’s newly unveiled GPT-6 Astra, a model that Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has now sensationally declared represents the arrival of the holy grail of AI — artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
“GPT-6 Astra, trained on ~100K+ NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72,” Mr Huang wrote on X on Monday morning.
“AGI has arrived. Congratulations @OpenAI team.”
Mr Huang added, “400K GPUs coming online next.”
AGI refers to artificial intelligence capable of handling most kinds of intellectual work a human can perform, rather than being restricted to a particular task.
There is no universally agreed test for when AGI has been achieved, and OpenAI itself has not claimed that the milestone has been reached.
But the company has described Astra as its “most intelligent and aligned model”, saying it represents a major leap in computer use, software engineering, science, mathematics and professional work.
It can operate computers, browse the web, fill out forms, update customer records, work with spreadsheets and presentations, create websites and analyse scientific data.
In testing, OpenAI said Astra completed computer-use tasks substantially faster than its predecessor GPT-5.6 Sol.
The model is also being positioned as a major scientific tool, with OpenAI saying it has helped solve longstanding mathematical problems and can work directly with specialist software to inspect scientific data.
But its capabilities have also raised concerns.
OpenAI said Astra reached a perfect score on one cybersecurity benchmark and was capable, when run without production safeguards, of finding previously unknown vulnerabilities and developing exploits capable of achieving arbitrary code execution.
The company said two previously unknown “zero-day” vulnerabilities discovered during testing had been disclosed to their maintainers.
Astra is being rolled out with additional safeguards designed to prevent it from carrying out more dangerous cyber tasks.
The extraordinary capabilities come as AI companies pour vast amounts of computing power into their models.
Mr Huang said Astra was trained using more than 100,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVLink72 systems, with each system capable of linking 72 GPUs together so they can function as a massive computational unit.
The Nvidia boss initially claimed the model had been trained on 300,000 such systems before deleting the post and replacing it with the smaller figure.
The numbers are significant for Nvidia, which has become one of the biggest financial beneficiaries of the AI boom.
AI users have flooded social media with stunned reactions to Astra’s capabilities since the model’s wide release on Friday.
One researcher using Astra demonstrated a striking application of AI and neuroscience by placing a reconstructed fruit fly connectome inside Minecraft.
The model is not a recreation of the fly’s consciousness, nor does it contain a living brain.
Instead, the developer, Evan Sinclair from the Georgia Institute of Technology, used a reconstructed map of the fly’s neural connections, with simplified rules governing how activity moves through the network.
Events inside Minecraft feed into the model, while activity in selected groups of neurons determines movements such as flying, grooming, feeding and escaping.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have only recently completed the painstaking work of mapping the male fruit fly’s brain, identifying about 124 million connections between nerve cells and comparing them with an earlier map of a female fly.
Researchers found that about 95 per cent of the cells are shared between male and female flies, but subtle differences in the remaining five per cent appear to underpin behaviours including aggression, courtship and the distinctive “love song” produced by males vibrating their wings.
The work could ultimately help researchers understand how genes shape brain wiring and behaviour, while also providing inspiration for more efficient AI systems.
And now, with Astra capable of modelling and interacting with that wiring, the boundary between biological intelligence and artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
OpenAI said GPT-6 Astra began rolling out to a limited group of organisations on September 3, with access expanding to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users, as well as developers through its API, Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock.