Hey Jeff & team, just ask one of the alphabet groups. They've hacked the brain many years ago.

IMHO, the only reason he is funding this is because he wants this information to sell you more Amazon crap from China.

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Rob Williams knows how to pitch Jeff Bezos: You write a press release as if your product has already been built. Bezos reads it and gives a thumbs up or down.

Williams went through this process a lot as an executive on Amazon’s “S-team,” in charge of software products such as Alexa, until his departure last fall. But the pitch he made a few weeks later—in December 2025—was different. Now he was collaborating with Thomas Reardon, a neuroscientist and repeat startup founder, and approaching Bezos as a funder.

Here’s what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom:

Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.

Though the inspiration for LLMs was rooted in biology, current frontier models have little in common with the human brain. A person uses about 20 watts of energy to process information; a single chip in an AI training cluster uses more than 30 times that amount. The hyperscalers require thousands of chips and gigawatts of energy, enough to power small cities. And those models need to suck up virtually all of what humans have written. Each new model requires more, more, more. For all of that, the models don’t learn. Once you train them, they’re stuck.
The goal, Reardon tells me, is to build “a synthetic artificial intelligence brain that runs on 50 watts or less.” It should adapt to its conditions, be as nimble as a human mind, and burn a tiny fraction of an LLM’s compute power and energy. The proof of concept is thriving inside our skulls. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with saying, ‘I need to basically read every book ever written 20 times over in order to learn English,’” Reardon says. “A human baby does it with a couple hundred thousand utterances.”

Reardon and Williams haven’t figured out yet how to build systems that match the magic of a human brain. What they have is a belief that an expert, well-resourced team—of AI researchers and neuroscientists working essentially side by side—can find the answer. The neuroscientists will conduct original wet lab experiments with some of the most advanced lab equipment available, to hunt for usable intel on the brain’s architecture. They plan to release the models they’re currently developing as near-term products on the path to a full reinvention of AI.

“The brain has a secret we haven’t found yet,” says Wayne. The team is focusing on structures called cortical columns, which one Flourish scientist calls “the canonical computational unit” of the brain. One of Flourish’s investors is Jacob Vogelstein, a neuroscientist turned venture capitalist who, along with his brother Joshua and others, started an ambitious initiative called the Open Connectome Project. “The idea was that you could collect all these images of the brain and start to do data processing on them to try to interpret the circuits,” he says.