New AI project aims to mimic the human neocortex: The Thousand Brains Project offers a fundamentally different approach to AI

“We can build machines that work like the neocortex in terms of sensorimotor learning, and they’re inherently robotic,” Hawkins says. “I think our work is not only the future of AI, but also robotics.”

In addition, the project is developing AI based on the neocortex’s reliance on reference frames. In the mammalian brain, so-called place cells help encode memories of locations and grid cells help map locations in space. The neocortex uses these reference frames to store and understand the constant stream of sensorimotor data it receives.

“The way in which the brain structures data—in 2-D and 3-D reference frames—copies the structures of objects in the real world,” Hawkins says. “When you look at deep networks, they don’t fundamentally understand the world, which is why if you just change one tiny feature of an image, they often don’t recognize it. In contrast, reference frames can help the brain understand how its models of objects might change under different conditions.”

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The Gates Foundation is providing the Thousand Brains Project a minimum of $2.69 million over two years. (The Gates Foundation declined to comment for this article.) “We also hope to announce agreements with government agencies around the world soon,” Hawkins says.