A Mouse Brain, 1.6 Petabytes of Data, and the Path to AGI
Scientists recently digitized a single cubic millimeter of a mouse’s visual cortex, a project that generated 1.6 petabytes of data to map 84,000 neurons and half a billion synapses. To put that into perspective, the number of synapses in that tiny piece of brain tissue is comparable to the number of parameters in large-scale AI like DeepSeek or GPT models. It’s significantly more than the 29 billion parameters in a model like GigaChat. This comparison is a useful analogy for scale and complexity: just as synapses determine a brain’s processing capacity, parameters define the “power” of an AI. ...