Jerry Liu(@jerryjliu0):Introducing FlyOCR 🪰 - I trained a fly brain to read a PDF It uses the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectcome. The architecture is inspired by doomfly by @wormuth The fly splits a pdf image into individual glyphs, maps pixels into receptor activations, runs simplified current-based dynamics across the 166k neurons and 25m edges in the circuit, applies a compact readout model on the downstream spikes, and concatenates everything into the parsed output. On reading an actual Microsoft 10-k, the fly gets ~86% over the balance sheet heading, but is largely able to read the numeric values correctly. Over 1.7k+ sampled glyphs (chars+digits) it gets 87% accuracy. With enough training it might match some of the latter-generation MNIST models! Maybe eventually we’ll replace our doc parsing VLMs with flies. Full video below. Repo with full code + report:

2026.09.13 16:10

Introducing FlyOCR 🪰 - I trained a fly brain to read a PDF It uses the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectcome. The architecture is inspired by doomfly by @wormuth The fly splits a pdf image into individual glyphs, maps pixels into receptor activations, runs simplified current-based dynamics across the 166k neurons and 25m edges in the circuit, applies a compact readout model on the downstream spikes, and concatenates everything into the parsed output. On reading an actual Microsoft 10-k, the fly gets ~86% over the balance sheet heading, but is largely able to read the numeric values correctly. Over 1.7k+ sampled glyphs (chars+digits) it gets 87% accuracy. With enough training it might match some of the latter-generation MNIST models! Maybe eventually we’ll replace our doc parsing VLMs with flies. Full video below. Repo with full code + report: