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 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.
In 2024, we decided that this approach was very promising and began calling for researchers around the world to follow and join this exciting project and in 2025, the Thousand Brains Project was incorporated as a non-profit entity to allow the team to focus on it’s mission without distraction.
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 believe that such a system will be the basis for applications that 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, Numenta has pledged to not assert our patents related to the Thousand Brains Theory. You can find more details on the 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.
