In this paper, we present a low-complexity, near maximum-likelihood (ML) performance achieving detector for large MIMO systems having tens of transmit and receive antennas. Such large MIMO systems are of interest because of the high spectral efficiencies possible in such systems. The proposed detection algorithm, termed as multistage likelihood-ascent search (M-LAS) algorithm, is rooted in Hopfield neural networks, and is shown to possess excellent performance as well as complexity attributes. In terms of performance, in a 64 × 64 V-BLAST system with 4-QAM, the proposed algorithm achieves an uncoded BER of 10⁻³ at an SNR of just about 1 dB away from AWGN-only SISO performance given by Q(√SNR). In terms of coded BER, with a rate-3/4 turbo code at a spectral efficiency of 96 bps/Hz the algorithm performs close to within about 4.5 dB from theoretical capacity, which is remarkable in terms of both high spectral efficiency as well as nearness to theoretical capacity. Our simulation results show that the above performance is achieved with a complexity of just O(NtNr) per symbol, where Nt and Nr denote the number of transmit and receive antennas.