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Thousand Brains Project

@thousandbrains.org
389 followers 611 following 351 posts

Advancing AI & robotics by reverse engineering the neocortex. Leveraging sensorimotor learning, structured reference frames, & cortical modularity. Open-source research backed by Jeff Hawkins & Gates Foundation. Explore thousandbrains.org

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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 29/09/2026
🇮🇹 Three teams, one week in Rome, and three amazing results. Watch the Rome Focus Week hackathon presentations: an ARC-AGI-3 integration, a brand-new attention system prototype in Monty, and new ways to merge object models or split them into reusable parts.
Final Presentation of the whole Thousand Brains Project for the Rome Focus Week
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 25/09/2026
So much can happen in two years: 🧠 Major advances in Monty’s capabilities 🛠️ Improved ecosystem and tooling around Monty 🌎 Real-world experiments with robotics hardware arms and ultrasound 🔬 Theoretical advances and a clearer roadmap toward sensorimotor AI
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 24/09/2026
🇮🇹 It’s time for the Rome Monty focus week! The team shares hackathon proposals, from unsupervised learning of unfamiliar objects and connecting Monty to ARC-AGI-3 to using symmetry and attention to improve recognition and exploration. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/9vQmx2C7o3M
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 22/09/2026
👀 What might an attention system look like inside Monty? @cortical-canonical.bsky.social and @canoetrip.bsky.social discuss a system based around salience, spatial regions, and voxel grids, and how attention could help Monty focus on parts of compositional objects and avoid revisiting familiar areas
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 16/09/2026
Benji shares a heartfelt thank you to the community for their valuable contributions in August 2026. 🫶🏼 Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCwO...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 09/09/2026
🔄 What if Monty could learn an object’s symmetry and use that knowledge in the future? @vivianeclay.bsky.social walks us through an early prototype about how Monty could store symmetry in object models to reduce redundant hypotheses, and discusses the open questions that remain.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 03/09/2026
📊 What’s next for the Monty platform? @tristanls.bsky.social explores how we’re separating Monty from experiment infrastructure and simulated environments, and building a telemetry pipeline that emits standardized data as events happen. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/G9CqGYArJLQ
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 26/08/2026
🎮 How would an AI solve a problem without using language or external knowledge? @vivianeclay.bsky.social explores ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark test for artificial intelligence, and how it could become a practical testing environment for new feature prototypes in Monty.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 19/08/2026
🧠 How does the brain build, update, and switch between maps of the world? @vivianeclay.bsky.social dives deep into grid cell literature, exploring how they anchor based on landmarks, remap as environments change, switch between reference frames, and operate across multiple spatial scales.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 12/08/2026
Benji shares a big thank you to the community for their valuable contributions in July 2026. 🫶🏼 Watch the full video here: youtu.be/wL0GuAWlXWM
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 06/08/2026
🧠Ready for a whirlwind of neuroscience research? @tristanls.bsky.social recaps research that stood out to him from the recent FENS conference. Topics include new findings on how the brain maps space, prepares for action, corrects errors, makes predictions, and forms memories.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 04/08/2026
How does Monty perform in the real world? Zachary Danzig shares his undergraduate thesis, which brings Monty to real robotic hardware. His proof of concept project combined stereo vision, depth sensing and a robotic arm for object recognition. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/3wgHNqkRekM
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 30/07/2026
🔍 What open questions remain for the Thousand Brains Theory? @vivianeclay.bsky.social guides a wide-ranging discussion on attention, scale, unsupervised learning, model representations, and the role of goals and actions. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/AGp6zn_IO-s
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 28/07/2026
🎯 How should attention guide perception? @cortical-canonical.bsky.social and @canoetrip.bsky.social explore attention as an area-based constraint to guide Monty’s resources, and how we can use salience maps and flood-fill algorithms to find regions of interest.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 23/07/2026
📍How do reference frames work in the brain? How could they work in the neocortex? Jeff and @hojaeklee.bsky.social discuss papers on grid cells, place cells, path integration, and overlapping grid modules, and lead a high-level exploratory discussion.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 21/07/2026
Could overlapping grid cell modules help explain unresolved questions about reference frames in the thousand brains theory? Jeff sparked a discussion about how the neocortex might represent unique locations. No conclusions just yet. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=469n...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 16/07/2026
🧠 @canoetrip.bsky.social shows how visual salience can guide Monty’s sensors to move to the most informative features. The result: sparser models, fewer movements, and no loss in accuracy. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE-Z...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 14/07/2026
@vivianeclay.bsky.social reviews our progress in Q2 2026 and goes over our plans for the next quarter. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/MtrvhYQ6VFw
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 09/07/2026
@vivianeclay.bsky.social shares her gratitude to the community for their valuable contributions in June 2026. 🫶🏼 Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-lx...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 07/07/2026
🤖 How does Monty know where to look next? 👀 @vivianeclay.bsky.social and @cortical-canonical.bsky.social discuss attentional regions, how attention relates to policies, gating sensory input and voting, and whether prediction error can help guide Monty’s behavior.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 02/07/2026
🧠 What changes when Monty goes from one column to multiple columns? Jeff presents key challenges, then brainstorms around how information can be shared during learning and inference. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r3n...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 30/06/2026
🦾 In this meeting, @vivianeclay.bsky.social goes over a high-level overview of Monty’s capabilities (current and future) as well as unresolved theoretical questions. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/vc7O4Ludbcw
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 25/06/2026
💡 @vivianeclay.bsky.social gives a summary of a research meeting where we do a deeper dive into trajectory memory for behavior models. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3zB...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 23/06/2026
🧠Jeff gives a summary of a research meeting where we discuss trajectory memory for behavior models and shared learning. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcfv...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 18/06/2026
🚀 A big step forward for Monty! Hojae introduces the new 2D sensor module to deal with 3D distortions. This enables Monty to learn a logo on one surface and now recognize it on any other surface! Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi96...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 16/06/2026
A big thank you from @vivianeclay.bsky.social to the community for their valuable contributions in May 2026. 🫶🏼 Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSUq...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 11/06/2026
🧠 Jeff gives a summary of a research meeting where we discuss open theory questions. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBu2...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 10/06/2026
📖 Our paper “Thousand-Brain Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference” is now published in Neural Computation! Read more about how Monty works, its capabilities, and advantages over transformers: direct.mit.edu/neco/article...
direct.mit.edu
Thousand-Brains Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference
Abstract. Current AI systems achieve impressive performance on many tasks, yet they lack core attributes of biological intelligence, including rapid, continual learning, representations grounded in se...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 09/06/2026
✨ @vivianeclay.bsky.social gives a summary of a research meeting where we discuss state in morphology models. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3VY...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 08/06/2026
📖 Our paper “Thousand-Brain Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference” is now published in Neural Computation! Read more about how Monty works, its capabilities, and advantages over transformers: direct.mit.edu/neco/article...
direct.mit.edu
Thousand-Brains Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference
Abstract. Current AI systems achieve impressive performance on many tasks, yet they lack core attributes of biological intelligence, including rapid, continual learning, representations grounded in se...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 04/06/2026
🤌 @cortical-canonical.bsky.social gives a summary of a research meeting where we discuss the Milan Week takeaways and ideas around object state and behaviors. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/1vNRku9BZHM
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 02/06/2026
📝 @ramymounir.com gives a summary of a research meeting where we discussed voting and shared learning using temporal memory and spatial pooler-like mechanisms. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vB2...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 28/05/2026
🧠 @vivianeclay.bsky.social recaps key takeaways from a recent focus week on how the brain could learn to accomplish goals. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRgq...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 26/05/2026
🧠 Jeff reviews literature on the hippocampal complex and presents new ideas from a recent focus week around learning temporary models. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/zCMCCwJEmmc
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 21/05/2026
✨ @vivianeclay.bsky.social gives a summary of a research meeting where we discuss new insights around deformations, location sharing, and affordances. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJLH...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 19/05/2026
☕ @cortical-canonical.bsky.social summarizes a recent research meeting in which we discussed top-down connections and other topics related to modeling compositional objects. We also touched on concepts like attention and leveraging different model types across columns.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 15/05/2026
Scott and Tristan have done major refactoring of Monty’s motor system over the past months, making it easier to use, more customizable, and more powerful. Check out this video for a high-level overview of the new structure and capabilities: youtu.be/axxcF3wyInI
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 13/05/2026
@vivianeclay.bsky.social thanks the community for their exciting contributions in April 2026. 🫶🏼 Watch the full video here: youtu.be/OGg7VDaAPoI
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 12/05/2026
@vivianeclay.bsky.social recaps the discussion of current model limitations, covering object interactions, object deformation, and more abstract concepts such as sets and bigness. She proposes using surface models for handling object distortions and ways in which object interactions could be modeled
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 07/05/2026
🤓 @vivianeclay.bsky.social gives a summary of a research meeting where we discussed how the brain might model and recognize materials like water, fire, or cloth, as well as deformed objects that can take many shapes, such as a t-shirt. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/iIu-3zZgQaI
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 05/05/2026
✨ @cortical-canonical.bsky.social summarized the key takeaways from a recent brainstorming week on actions and causality. We discuss how we can leverage behavior and morphology models, learn causal associations between them, and examine the nature of subcortical motor outputs.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 30/04/2026
💡Scott gives a summary of today’s research meeting, where we prepared for the focus week on actions and causality. We reviewed past ideas around behavior models, time, hippocampus, and causality. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/XIIdIXwUBhY
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 28/04/2026
🧠Jeff gives a summary of a research meeting, where we brainstormed around learning classes of objects. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpNz...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 23/04/2026
@vivianeclay.bsky.social reviews the different kinds of reference frames we have in Monty and how we transform between them. The team discusses various questions and open issues around voting on locations.
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 21/04/2026
🧠 @vivianeclay.bsky.social recaps key ideas from behavior modeling discussions, exploring how behavior and morphology models can be separated, learned, and connected. She also proposes the idea of surface models and how all this could map onto the brain. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGfm...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 17/04/2026
Viviane reviews our progress in Q1 2026 and goes over our plans for the next quarter. Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YpH...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 15/04/2026
@vivianeclay.bsky.social thanks the community for their exciting contributions in March 2026. 🫶🏼 Watch the full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SUZ...
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 13/04/2026
A few weeks ago, we all met up in person and had a fun, productive, and intense week! Working in three teams, we made significant progress across three fronts: integrating the MuJoCo simulator, simplifying our configurations, and advancing our theory! Link in thread⬇️
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 09/04/2026
Jeff and Hojae give a summary of today’s research meeting, where we discussed learning efficiently in a hierarchy. Watch the full video here: youtu.be/ti_zsduCoIM
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Thousand Brains Project @thousandbrains.org · 07/04/2026
‼️We just released a public dataset and repo for ultrasound perception using Monty. Work on this could improve automatic analysis and guidance for diagnostic ultrasound, especially in low-resource settings. Open for everyone to explore.🌏
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