Jeff Hawkins

Hawkins was born on Long Island, New York, on June 1, 1957. His father was a tinkerer who, with his sons, built a floating platform called the “Sea Space”; the experience sharpened his interest in math, physics and engineering.⁠[1]

In 1979 he graduated from Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry with a BS in electrical engineering.⁠[2]

After graduating he held technical positions at IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry, then joined GRiD Systems Corporation as vice president of research, serving as principal architect and designer of the GRiDPad and GRiD Convertible.⁠[3]

In the mid-1980s he entered UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry’s graduate program in biophysics to pursue his interest in neuroscience.⁠[4]

While at GRiD he developed and patented PalmPrint, a handwriting-recognition software interface, and helped design the GRiDPad, a tablet computer released in October 1989 at a price of US$2,370.⁠[5]

In 1992 he and Donna Dubinsky founded Palm Computing. Palm was acquired in 1995 by modem maker U.S. Robotics, which 3Com Corp. bought in 1997; the two wanted Palm spun off, which 3Com at first refused but ultimately did in 2000.⁠[6]

Palm’s PilotPilot.comPilot (legal name Pilot.com, Inc.) is a U.S. company founded in 2017 that provides bookkeeping, tax preparation and chief financial officer services to startups and small businesses.Open the full entry cost less than $300 and used his Graffiti handwriting system. The first units shipped in spring 1996, more than one million were sold within 18 months, and the device was later renamed the PalmPilot.⁠[1]

In July 1998 he co-founded Handspring with Palm colleagues Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan; the company later created the Treo, which established the blueprint for the modern smartphone.⁠[7]

On June 20, 2000, Handspring sold ten million shares at $20 each, raising $200 million, and began trading on Nasdaq the next day.⁠[8]

In October 2001 Handspring unveiled the Treo smartphone with integrated wireless communications; one version had a tiny keyboard and dropped the Graffiti character-entry system he had invented.⁠[9]

In April 2002 he founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI), a private non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, to develop a theoretical framework for the thalamo-cortical system; it was funded by the Strauss-Hawkins Trust.⁠[10]

In February 2003, while chief product officer of Handspring, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for creating the handheld computing paradigm and the first commercially successful handheld computing device; he then held twelve patents on handheld devices and features.⁠[11]

On June 4, 2003, Handspring and Palm signed a merger agreement. He told analysts on a conference call: “This is not a reunion for me, and there is no nostalgia.”⁠[6]

The merger filing showed he was then Handspring’s chairman and chief product officer and would serve part-time as Palm’s chief technology officer after the merger.⁠[12]

In 2004 he wrote On Intelligence, a book about cortical theory.⁠[2]

Written with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee and published by Times Books, the 272-page book argued that AI research should focus on the nature of human thought rather than computing power.⁠[13]

In March 2005 he and Dubinsky announced Numenta, named from “mentis,” the Latin word for mind, to turn his brain theory into a memory architecture modeled on the mammalian cortex; Dubinsky became CEO and Stanford PhD candidate Dileep GeorgeDileep GeorgeDileep George is an AI and neuroscience researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded Numenta and Vicarious. He is known for Hierarchical Temporal Memory, the Recursive Cortical Network and brain-inspired AI research, served as a director of research at Google DeepMind, and since 2026 has been Head of AI at Astera Institute.Open the full entry was the third founder. He said, “My goal at Numenta is to put my brain theory into practice.”⁠[14]

In 2005 RNI moved to UC Berkeley. With a $4 million gift from him and his wife, Janet Strauss, Berkeley created the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience within the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, headed by former RNI researcher Bruno Olshausen; a founding symposium was held on October 7 that year.⁠[4]

On May 13, 2009, he spoke in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series; related media include “Inside the Mind of a Reluctant Entrepreneur.”⁠[15]

In 2016 he and Subutai Ahmad published a paper in Frontiers in Neural Circuits proposing that pyramidal neurons with thousands of synapses and active dendrites can recognize hundreds of independent patterns, and building on this a network model that learns time-based sequences.⁠[16]

On October 25, 2017, he, Subutai Ahmad and Yuwei Cui published a paper in Frontiers in Neural Circuits proposing a network of columns and layers that learns and recognizes objects, with each column learning complete predictive models of observed objects.⁠[17]

In spring 2018 he took part in the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing’s “The Brain and Computation” program as a visiting scientist.⁠[2]

On July 1, 2019, he appeared on episode 25 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast; the episode description covers On Intelligence, Hierarchical Temporal Memory and the Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence.⁠[18]

On March 2, 2021, Basic Books published A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, with a foreword by Richard Dawkins; the publisher lists it among the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry’ best books of 2021 and Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry’ five favorite books of 2021.⁠[19]

On August 8, 2021, he returned for episode 208, discussing the origin of intelligence, the Thousand Brains theory, how to build superintelligent AI and existential risk from AI.⁠[20]

On June 5, 2024, Numenta launched the open-source Thousand Brains Project at a Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence conference to build a new AI platform by reverse engineering the neocortex, with funding from the Gates Foundation. He said, “The human brain has about 150,000 cortical columns, and each one is essentially its own learning machine.”⁠[21]

The Gates Foundation awarded Numenta $2.7 million to develop software reflecting his theory. He said the foundation felt that sensorimotor-type AI systems would be very helpful for global health issues.⁠[22]

On December 24, 2024, he, Viviane Clay and Niels Leadholm released a white paper describing an early thousand-brains system built from a repeating computational unit, the “learning module,” modeled on cortical columns.⁠[23]

In January 2025 Numenta announced the Thousand Brains Project as an independent nonprofit led by executive director Viviane Clay, with him as research advisor and board member while remaining on Numenta’s board; Numenta placed related patents under a non-assert pledge, and the project’s code had been released under the MIT license in November 2024.⁠[24]

On July 1, 2025, UC Berkeley marked the Redwood Center’s 20th anniversary, with remarks from him as founder; the center had grown to six faculty members and trained more than 50 PhDs.⁠[25]

On July 6 that month he and Thousand Brains Project researchers published a paper evaluating thousand-brains systems, including on rapid, continual learning.⁠[26]

In January 2026 the Computer History Museum named him a 2026 Fellow for developing groundbreaking, commercially successful handheld computers and smartphones that established the foundation for today’s mobile computing.⁠[7]

As of October 2026, the Thousand Brains Project’s team page lists him as founder and board member; its homepage says the project began significantly expanding internal research in 2024 and became a nonprofit in 2025.⁠[27]

Thousand Brains Project: Official website: https://thousandbrains.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[28]