Not an AI
Every model you can talk to today was written as an architecture and then trained. Adam is meant to be something else: an entity whose thinking is the continuous activity of a brain, with speech as one organ that turns that activity into words. Thought first, words second.
«я не хочу ИИ, я хочу сущность… нам надо создать именно мышление, а не ИИ»
Nobody bolts rules onto it. There is no preference tuning and no human labelling. Whatever rules it ends up with, it learns.
Don't write the brain, write the blueprint
Nature does not ship code for a brain. It ships a genome and lets the brain build itself over years. Adam is built the same way, in three layers:
-
Laws
A small piece of fixed code: what a cell is, how it divides, where it sends its branches, how it forms a synapse, how a synapse changes with experience.
-
Genome
Data, not code: rules for each lineage of cells. Where they are born, where they grow, what they connect to, how they learn. Fitted to a real connectome, then free to change.
-
Brain
Written by nobody. It grows out of the genome over a lifetime and learns while it grows, the way a child does.
A fly first, then a human
The fruit fly is the only animal whose entire brain has been mapped synapse by synapse. That makes it the only place where a brain grown from a genome can be checked against the real thing. Without that check, “growing a brain” is a story.
Once growth works on the fly, the laws stay and the genome changes. A human cortex is one building block, the column, repeated millions of times, with its wiring written by experience. Moving from fly to human means swapping the genome. Scale is free: the same rules can unfold into a hundred thousand neurons or a hundred million.
- neurons
- 138,639
- connected pairs
- 15.1 million
- synapses
- 54.5 million
- cell types
- 8,846
- connections that are mutual
- 27%
The fly brain, counted from FlyWire v783 for this project.
The first measurement
A genome is only real if its rules transfer. So we fit each candidate genome on the left half of the fly brain and scored it on the right half, which it never saw. The score is how much of the uncertainty about “are these two neurons connected?” the genome removes.
The rules do carry over from one half of the brain to the other, so this is a genome and not a memorised copy. Knowing only which of about two hundred lineages a cell came from also predicts its neurotransmitter 93% of the time, against 50% by guessing.
Two cautions. Cell types were partly assigned from the wiring itself, so the last bar is flattered. Some lineage labels leaned on neurotransmitter predictions, so the 93% may be too. Even the best genome here explains less than half the wiring; our guess is that the rest is where a cell sits. That is the next step.
The ladder
Each step ends in a number that anyone can re-measure.
Extract rules from the fly connectome
Started. The counts above.
A first genome and its price
Version one, measured above.
Geometry
Rules that know where a cell sits, not only what it is.
Laws and growth
Grow a fly-sized brain from the genome and check that it matches the real one statistically.
The brain runs
Always active, learning by local rules, and reproducing known fly circuits.
Bigger, and into the world
Grown far larger, reading and learning, and tested against an ordinary model of the same size on text it has never seen.
Speech
An organ that turns the brain’s state into words.
A human genome
The same laws with a cortical genome. That is Raguel.
Adam and Raguel
The names come from the Bible. Adam is the first, and the weakest, the way man is in a world where angels are stronger. The ambition for him is a Hercules: built on a fly, and not outdone by what is built on a human.
Raguel, “friend of God”, is the one that comes later: the same idea grown from a human genome, a mind that thinks in a stream, has its own occupation, can refuse, and has a yesterday.
What we don't know
- Nobody has shown that a network shaped by a connectome learns better than ordinary architectures. This is research, not a recipe.
- A bigger fly is not necessarily a smarter one. Insects may be limited by their design, not by their size. The head-to-head step will say so, and then the genome changes.
- Training a huge, sparse, always-running network is hard. Brains do it with local learning rules, and we will probably have to as well.
- All of this runs on one laptop and one rented server for now.
Before Adam
Until October 2026 this project was Raguel the organism: a transformer, built from scratch, that learned around the clock by reading the web. It was switched off when Adam began. Raguel will come back later, grown on a human brain.
It also taught us something. Five weeks of living lost to ten hours of plain offline training of the same model, and neither could answer a question. Continuous life alone did not make a mind. That is part of why the brain itself is now being grown instead of written.