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MARCH 24, 2005
By Peter Burrows Jeff Hawkins' Bold Brainstorm The man who launched Palm thinks he can give machines the smarts to work just like the human mind. Ambitious? Yes, but the experts aren't laughing
It's a few days before the public launch of his new company, and Jeff Hawkins is excited but also concerned. "We don't want this to get overhyped," he says, slumping down with his head nearly on the conference table of his small Menlo Park (Calif.) office. And worry about overexposure he should. For starters, Hawkins is a proven entrepreneur. The world's most famous designer of handheld computers, he co-founded Palm Computing and its offspring, Handspring (see BW Online, 10/21/04, "Wizard of the Wireless Future"). UNIFIED THEORY. This time, he's aiming at a far bigger opportunity than selling handheld gizmos. With his new company, Numenta, which he'll unveil on Mar. 24, he's trying to do no less than create machines that work just like the human brain. "This could radically change the way that computer systems work," says Harry Saal, a Silicon Valley veteran and one of a handful of investors in the company. Certainly, Hawkins' pedigree, coupled with the vast implications of his new quest, will garner a lot of attention. But before you ask, the answer is no -- Hawkins' inquisitive brain hasn't taken him around the bend. Neuroscience, the study of the brain, has fascinated him since 1979, when he read a Scientific American article on the roots of intelligence. It started his obsession with finding the Holy Grail of neuroscience: a unified theory of how the brain works. While neuroscientists over the years have parsed the problem into more digestible chunks -- say, how a neuron fires -- he says no one has put all the pieces together. "I tried several times to make this my career," says Hawkins, who three years ago created the self-funded Redwood Neuroscience Institute, where he spends most of his time. "Nobody had done the theoretical analysis of the brain." "GENTLEMAN SCIENTIST?" Now, he thinks he has figured it all out and believes that he and an associate have come up with a way to translate his theories into electronic terms. Their company will license -- for free, at least for the first few years -- technology to others who may want to create what he predicts will be truly intelligent machines. "He's moving from the neuroscience to the computer science," says Palm and Handspring co-founder Donna Dubinsky, who will serve as Numenta's chief executive. (Hawkins' title will simply be "founder.") Of course, Hawkins' goal carries long odds, and critics say he has tried to take a shortcut by skirting peer review and letting the market, rather than more research, prove or disprove his theories. Some compare him to a certain 18th-century gentleman scientist -- a rich man using his personal wealth to pursue a radical vision. Of course, for every Ben Franklin, there were scores of others whose aspirations never panned out. Not surprisingly, Hawkins' work is raising big questions from the hard-core science crowd. "He's a man of action, and he wants to get things done," says Terrence Sejnowski, head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. "That's a different mode from most scientists, who are more interested in taking small steps and getting each step right." NEURAL HIERARCHY. Hawkins' basic theory, laid out in his 2004 book, On Intelligence (see BW, 11/08/04, "Redefining Smart"), says the brain doesn't function as a miraculously fast processing unit, like a microchip. Instead, it represents a rather simple memory system that keeps track of all kinds of patterns over time -- whether they are sights, sounds, textures, or any other kind of input. He believes this system is hierarchical -- that there are lower-level bits of brain that note specific details, which humans later synthesize into overall experiences. That allows someone, for example, to know that the combination of the touch of a finger on the shoulder and the sight of a masseuse's pillow means a massage will ensue. By gathering an uncountable number of these patterns every instant of every day, the brain -- actually, the neocortex, or "the big wrinkly thing on top of the brain that does all the higher-level functions," as Hawkins puts it -- can predict what to make of any situation it encounters.
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