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An AI tool called SLEAP labels the body parts of flies. Credit: Talmo Lab at the Salk Institute

AI-enabled micro-measurements of animals running, hunting, preening and playing are unlocking troves of new data that scientists now want to use to simulate animals and test theories about behavior and the brain.

Why it matters: A primary function of the brain is to produce behavior and help animals move through the world but there are questions about how that happens, with ramifications for medicine and efforts to create artificial general intelligence (AGI).

What's happening: AI methods are increasingly being used to help scientists measure the behaviors of animals, a laborious task that typically involves researchers watching animals and tracking and annotating their movements.

Animal behavior scientists, or ethologists, use the AI tools to track the natural behaviors of single and more recently multiple animals. The information can be used to recreate the behavior in a lab, where at the same time researchers can measure the activity of neurons in the brain or silence them, and see the effect on behavior.

The AI tools are "really powerful because you are getting behavior quantification at the scale the brain works at millisecond precision," says Cory Miller, a neurobiologist at the University of California San Diego, who studies the neural mechanisms of behaviors in marmoset monkeys.

Another tool called MoSeq finds smaller components of movement what the tool's developer, Harvard University neurobiologist Bob Datta, calls "syllables." His research group has identified about 50 of these short units of behavior and the sequences in which they tend to occur in order to identify and predict different behaviors.

Yes, but: The brain does not output coordinates, Pereira says. "It does not think in x,y, z changes in position of wrist."

What's next: An effort in its early stages is underway to use behavioral data to create simulated bodies, or animals.

Between the lines: Building these simulated animals will likely require combining the different approaches of AI models used to track and developing new tools, Datta says.

The big picture: There is an active debate about whether any artificial general intelligence will need to be embodied.

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AI tools trace the body's link between the brain and behavior - Axios