Announcing the Independence of the Thousand Brains Project!

General
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Dear TBP Community,

We’re excited to share a significant update: The Thousand Brains Project is now an independent, non-profit organization, separate from Numenta. See the press release.

Why the Separation?

Numenta was founded on a dual mission:

  • To reverse-engineer the neocortex
  • To apply these neocortical principles to advance AI.

This transition marks a significant milestone in our journey. Numenta will apply its neuroscience derived technology to advance deep learning based AI, while the Thousand Brains Project will build an entirely new form of AI based on sensorimotor learning. Placing the Thousand Brains Project in its own independent non-profit will enable the development of a worldwide community of researchers focused on this goal.

This independence allows us to fully commit to our mission without the distractions of for-profit motivations. Every effort will now be dedicated to developing groundbreaking software in collaboration with our global community.

Jeff Hawkins’ Role

Jeff Hawkins will continue to serve on Numenta and the Thousand Brains Project boards. He also remains an active member of our research team, as many of you have seen in our YouTube research meetings.

Our New Online Home

Visit our new website: thousandbrains.org
This will be the central hub for accessing resources, updates, and tools for community collaboration.

Patents and Licensing

  • Numenta’s Non-Assert Pledge on patents relevant to the Thousand Brains Project allows us to continue building on innovations the project came up with in the past years at Numenta.
  • All our software will continue to be released under an MIT License, allowing you to build, innovate, and profit without concerns about licensing fees or royalties.

A Stronger Open-Source Future

This separation safeguards the open-source integrity of the Thousand Brains Project. As an independent non-profit, we are protected from potential corporate acquisitions that might deprioritize or shelve our research.

Additionally, this independence enables us to appoint board members aligned explicitly with our goals. It also makes fund allocations and grants easier to allocate as investors into Numenta’s current technology compared to the Thousand Brains Project typically have different interests in mind.

Looking Ahead

While we’ll miss working daily with our colleagues at Numenta, we’re excited to continue collaborating with them - and all of you - as open-source partners in this journey.

To the future!

The Thousand Brains Project Team

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Very exciting news!

But just a heads up, it appears that some of the links on the site aren’t quite working yet. For instance: https://thousandbrains.org/short_tbp_overview/ returns a “page not found.”

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Good catch! I removed that link for now, while we search for where that paper went.

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Looks like you actually have it hosted over on the numenta domain still. Under /uploads/2024/06/.

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Is this a good thing? Not clear to me yet.

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Ended up poking around your site a bit more (I’m bored). I noticed a few more things that you might want to consider looking up. Only the top-most two things are important, everything else I pretty much dredged up out of pedantic boredom. But anywho, here you go:

  1. From FAQ page. Under the ‘Do you think LLMs will become obsolete’ question. The “Technology” link is broken: https://thousandbrains.org/platform

  2. From the community page, under “Why Contribute?” The “Download 2-Pager” link is broken: https://thousandbrains.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/TBP_Why_Contribute.pdf

  3. You have a page outlining some Google Oauth stuff. Not sure if you plan on implementing something like DiscourseConnect into WP (its about the only reason as to why this page might be here). But anyways, this one confused me a bit. Heres the link: Thousand Brains Project Discourse Sign In App | Thousand Brains Project

  4. The blog directory is still visible. Though with only a single post: Blog | Thousand Brains Project

  5. Lastly, you still have an archived job posting, visible here: (archive) Open-Source Community Manager | Thousand Brains Project (I actually think I remember seeing this exact posting some time back!)

Short of getting invasive with probing the site, that’s about all I could find that’s out of the ordinary. Hopefully this will be the last of the broken site links!

But anyhow, I’m heading to bed now. Hopefully you all have a good weekend!

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thanks @HumbleTraveller! Most of these have been remedied. The discourse sign in app was for the social sign in to this forum as Google requires it during the validation phase.

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