  Random neural networks are dynamical descriptions of randomly interconnected
neural units. These show a phase transition to chaos as a disorder parameter is
increased. The microscopic mechanisms underlying this phase transition are
unknown, and similarly to spin-glasses, shall be fundamentally related to the
behavior of the system. In this Letter we investigate the explosion of
complexity arising near that phase transition. We show that the mean number of
equilibria undergoes a sharp transition from one equilibrium to a very large
number scaling exponentially with the dimension on the system. Near
criticality, we compute the exponential rate of divergence, called topological
complexity. Strikingly, we show that it behaves exactly as the maximal Lyapunov
exponent, a classical measure of dynamical complexity. This relationship
unravels a microscopic mechanism leading to chaos which we further demonstrate
on a simpler class of disordered systems, suggesting a deep and underexplored
link between topological and dynamical complexity.
