To be fair, we’re not unsympathetic to why Eon used the language they did. Their careful blog post on ‘How the Eon Team Produced a Virtual Embodied Fly’ would likely have only been read by a few hundred neuroscientists, while “We’ve uploaded a fruit fly” reached millions. Startup survival requires investment, funding follows excitement, and excitement follows headlines—not careful caveats. This bold approach may even feel obligatory when an organisation’s stated mission is “solving brain emulation as an engineering sprint, not a decades-long research program.”
You’re right that it isn’t a WBE. Also, incentives: