The Thousand Brains Model of Intelligence | Hacker News Reader

The Thousand Brains Model of Intelligence

medium.com

43 pointsjcua9 comments

HTM has been covered here a dozen different ways.

Still waiting for good examples of how the technology solves problems better than other methods.

If they had a solution that was better than what was out there, and they are publishing their research, then it follows we should be able to find their novelty in their publications, right? So, I took a look at their publication track record on this topic [0], and there are a few red flags that stood out to me.

First, they're publishing at a pretty astounding rate, with new submissions roughly every 1-3 months for the past 3 years, with the same authors. I'm skeptical that a small (<5?) research team would be able to produce novel contributions at such a rate, which leads me to believe they're probably remixing previous works into incremental publications.

Second, all of their publications are in neuroscience journals, which may not be up to date with the latest research going on with HTM in (for example) computer science. NIPS does have a computational neuroscience track, after all - I would have expected at least some interdisciplinary leakage if the novelty was very high.

Finally, the journals that they're publishing in are relatively low-ranking, which also seems to indicate that what they're doing is not necessary very novel (as you said, perhaps just a re-hash of existing HTM research).

Also, this article was co-written with a marketing exec, so I think it's fair to bring a certain level of skepticism.

[0]: https://numenta.com/resources/papers/

Unless I misinterpret what you are saying, your arguments only explain why you don't expect to see novelty, but you haven't actually looked at the publications and concluded that they don't contain any.

Well researched and though out. Thanks.

Hmmm - I've always thought you could see the effect of the vertical stack every time you were out for a walk and found yourself four feet in the air with your brain going "My bad dude - stick, not a snake "- I only read the linked article, but on the surface, it seems like imputing magical properties to the stack it doesn't need - if you just look at it as a mechanism for allowing certain signals to move across the hierarchy because they are extremely beneficial in bundling the wider range of information that's rising up from the broader lower hierarchical layers. My 2c admittedly.

> "...our brain is not building one model of the world. It’s building thousands of models in parallel!"

Isn't this discussed in Minsky's "Society of Mind"?

This kinda sounds like each cortical column is doing SLAM in it's individual sensor modality.

as someone not familiar with the SLAM acronym, had to look it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...

Turtles all the way down then?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com