Thousand Brains Project

About the Project

The efforts of Jeff Hawkins and Numenta to understand how the brain works started over 30 years ago and culminated in the last two years with the publication of the Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence. Since then, we’ve been thinking about how to apply our insights about the neocortex to artificial intelligence. As described in this theory, it is clear that the brain works on principles fundamentally different from current AI systems. To build the kind of efficient and robust intelligence that we know humans are capable of, we need to design a new type of artificial intelligence. This is what the Thousand Brains Project is about.

With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, we are significantly expanding our internal research efforts and also calling for researchers around the world to follow, or even join this exciting project.

Reverse Engineering the Neocortex

If we can understand how the neocortex implements intelligence, we can construct alternative AI systems that have the potential to revolutionize AI. Evolution has spent billions of years optimizing this efficient and incredibly adaptive system called the neocortex. Reverse-engineering it is no small feat, but if we can, it will serve as a blueprint for building artificial general intelligence.

We have made significant progress in understanding the neocortex, the basis of intelligence in mammals. Now we are taking the lessons from years of dedicated in-house research and the wealth of insights from neuroscience and using them to build a truly intelligent system. We believe that such a system will be the basis for applications that simply are not possible today.

A New, Open-Source, AI Framework

Our research team has been implementing a general AI framework that follows the principles of the Thousand Brains Theory. This framework is available as an open-source code base. In addition, we will begin to actively publish our design and engineering progress. In order to further enable adoption, in the near future we will be pledging to not assert our patents related to the Thousand Brains Theory. You can find more details on our non-assert pledge and the patents included under this pledge here.

To encourage people to build on our ideas and apply our brain-based solutions and algorithms to their problems, we are putting together an easy-to-use SDK. We also want to encourage and foster an active research community and exchange around the Thousand Brains Theory and its application to AI.