MICrONS 2025

A groundbreaking moment in Neuroscience and AI!

Huge congratulations to our own Andreas Tolias and XaqPitkow (https://xaqlab.com/) and the entire MICrONS team on the release of a first-of-its-kind functional foundation model of the mouse visual cortex—based on neural activity from ~75,000 neurons and detailed electron microscopy mapping.

This remarkable model was trained across data from multiple mice and cortical areas an showed robust generalization to new neurons, animals, and even entirely new stimulus domains. It also predicted new properties like anatomically defined cell types. The team built functional digital twins of mouse brains, revealing that neurons don’t connect randomly—even when they physically can. Instead, they preferentially form connections based on functional similarity (“what” they do) rather than just spatial proximity (“where” they are). This challenges long-standing assumptions in cortical wiring.

This foundational work represents a breakthrough in systematically decoding neural activity, with profound implications for neuroscience and the future of AI- for understanding natural intelligence and building brain-inspired AI. ARNI can leverage this publicly available dataset to train and test our own functional models, and use the anatomy to provide more structure to these
models.

Congratulations to the incredible collaboration across institutions including Stanford, BCM, Princeton, Allen Institute, and others, and to IARPA and the BRAIN Initiative for supporting this ambitious project.

This body of work is published in Nature:
https://lnkd.in/gJwP85sq
https://lnkd.in/gFz8P9pv

Full website: https://lnkd.in/e7tnQ6ub