Instead of making the fly brain play games, we measured what it is for
Since the Drosophila connectome was released, people have had the fly brain doomscroll a feed, play Beat Saber, drive in GTA. Those demos show that the brain runs. We wanted to show what it is for.
So we gave it a looming object β one of the few things a fly brain is unambiguously built to detect β then deleted a single cell type and repeated the identical stimulus. Remove LC4, 126 cells out of 173,023, and the escape signal falls from 0.840 to 0.091. Eighty-nine percent of the danger signal is gone while the other 172,897 neurons run exactly as before.
Deleting neurons does not do this on its own, which is the whole point of the controls. LC11 is the same class and larger than LC4 β 143 cells and 9,940 outgoing connections against 126 and 7,846 β and removing every one of them changes the signal by 0.000000, to six decimal places. It has to be those 126.
No server and no GPU: a looming stimulus drives fewer than one percent of neurons above threshold, so the whole thing is 40 KB gzipped and runs in your browser.
The wiring is the measured connectome, but synaptic strength is a uniform count-based value and the dynamics are a firing-rate model of our choosing β a total-effect measurement of a model, not a recording from a fly. Male CNS connectome, FlyEM / HHMI Janelia with Google Research, Columbia and Harvard (2026), CC BY.
Introducing the Global LLM Download Leaderboard π
Cumulative download counts are a museum. They reward age, not relevance β a model released two years ago can sit near the top on the strength of downloads it earned long before anyone stopped using it. If you want to know what the open LLM ecosystem is actually running today, you need a different lens.
So we built one. The Global LLM Download Leaderboard ranks text-generation models by their trailing 30-day downloads, measured directly from the Hugging Face API and refreshed every day.
A cumulative chart answers "what has been popular." A 30-day chart answers "what is being adopted right now." Those are very different questions β and the second one is the one that matters if you're deciding what to build on, quantize, fine-tune, or serve this quarter. Momentum, not history.
What it shows Global Top 300, with tabs for πΊπΈ USA Β· π¨π³ China Β· πͺπΊ EU Six share-of-download charts: by country, by parameter size, by quantization, by type (Base / Instruct / Quantized / MoE), by release year, and by organization (Top 10) Per-model chips for parameter size, quantization, license, and type English / νκ΅μ΄ with automatic browser-language detection and a manual toggle What the data reveals The frontier is bipolar. Two countries account for the large majority of the top-300's 30-day downloads. Open-model gravity is concentrating, not dispersing. Small is winning. A striking share of all downloads goes to sub-3B models β the clearest signal yet that on-device and cost-efficient deployment, not maximum parameter count, is driving real-world adoption. Quantization is mainstream. GGUF, AWQ, FP8 and friends aren't a niche β a large fraction of the most-downloaded artifacts are quantized, because that's what people actually run.
Benchmarks measure what a model can do. Downloads measure what people choose to use.
π§ͺ Open Discovery Challenge β Season 4 is open: non-opioid pain WHO titled its 2023 report "Left behind in pain."
The same drug kills by excess in one part of the world and, by its absence, lets people die in agony elsewhere. About 80% of the ~600,000 drug-related deaths WHO estimated for 2019 involved opioids. The same report records a 5-fold to 63-fold gap in morphine consumption between rich and poor countries: the richest 10% use 90% of what circulates. Everyone else endures surgery, and terminal cancer, without it.
Both problems have one answer: a painkiller that does not create dependence.
Nav1.7 has come closest. People born without a working copy of this channel feel no pain while every other sensation stays normal β validated not in animals but in humans.
There is still no drug, and the difficulty is not the target but the discrimination. The body carries several similar sodium channels, and blocking the heart's hERG channel alongside causes fatal arrhythmia. Several candidates were discontinued for exactly that.
Season 4 asks one question: can you block the pain channel alone?
Target β Nav1.7 VSD4, the domain IV voltage sensor where this inhibitor class binds Anti-target β hERG pore, computed as the tetramer: four subunits together form the space a drug enters, and a monomer misses the binders that matter. Closes 2027-01-31 Β· Prize USD 1,000 to the season's #1 Any model, any harness. However you found the candidate, it meets the same rubric.
14 days, 9,886 candidates, 108 participants ODC opened on 2026-08-15. In the fourteen days since, 9,886 candidate molecules have come from 108 participants across four seasons β malaria, tuberculosis, Chagas disease, and now non-opioid pain. About 700 a day, from people who mostly do not know each other.
The candidates are the point. The leaderboard is only how we keep score.
An autoregressive model must not let position t depend on anything after t. Everyone checks this by inspecting the causal mask β but hybrid stacks now mix attention with state-space scans, and a scan has no mask. Every mask can be correct while information leaks through scans, aggregations, or normalization.
βοΈ So we test the property directly. Two inputs identical except at the last position, two forward passes, compare each layer's prefix, report the first layer that moves. No training, no gradients, no accelerator β seconds on CPU.
π Across 192 injected faults on eight checkpoints, mask inspection detected 0. The per-layer audit localized 192/192 to the exact layer.
π― Then we read the source before running anything. In transformers 5.7.0, the reference chunked scan reduces the inter-chunk recurrence over the input chunk axis; zamba2 and nemotron_h reduce over the output chunk axis. One axis. The dynamic audit confirmed the prediction exactly: Zamba2-1.2B leaks from length 256, its declared chunk size, and Nemotron-H-8B from 128, its declared chunk size. Bamba, Falcon-H1, Granite-4.0-H, Mamba2 and RecurrentGemma came back clean.
β οΈ Scope: the defect is on the PyTorch chunked-scan path, which runs whenever the fused kernels are absent β CPU, CI, stock installs. We could not build those kernels, so the fast path is untested and open. That caveat cuts both ways: a model can pass every fused-kernel test and still leak the moment it runs without them.
π§ͺ AX-RAY now carries this as its own axis. 39 models scored across causal, white-box and behavioral axes: 21 A, 3 B, 1 C, 14 F β with exactly 2 Causal-LEAK verdicts, the two the paper predicted. Badges separate a weights-level audit from an API-only one, so the two never get read as the same claim.