The Week of

We're skipping our usual news roundup this week to announce an exciting new addition to the JLS portfolio. 

JLS has invested in Horizon Intelligence Labs, a Boston company building artificial intelligence on a neuroscience-inspired design rather than the large language model architecture behind the leading AI systems.

Most AI models predict the next word in a sequence and learn new things only when the entire model is retrained. Horizon’s system, called Cortex, instead maintains an explicit store of what it has been taught, including the source of each piece of knowledge and its confidence level. It reasons over that store and ingests new material from a client’s own work in almost any form, including documents, spreadsheets, chat history, images, video, and audio. It runs on the client’s own computers rather than in an external cloud.
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That design also makes Horizon’s system auditable, unlike the typical AI black box. A conventional model cannot explain why it produced a given answer, because its reasoning is spread across billions of numerical weights and no record shows how they combine. Cortex can point to the specific knowledge behind a conclusion and its source. When its knowledge doesn’t support an answer, the company says the system is built to reply that it doesn’t know.

The efficiency figures are striking. The company reports that on the same chip, a conventional frontier model serves sixteen people, while Cortex serves 2,500, drawing a quarter of a watt per user versus thirty-seven. On MedXpertQA, a demanding medical reasoning benchmark, Cortex scored 57 percent, compared with 30 percent for a rival system built on the same underlying model after a full training run. It reached that score by learning in conversation rather than retraining.

Jeff Bezos is funding a competing effort along these lines, Thomas Reardon’s Flourish, in a reported $500 million seed round. Flourish expects to reach this level of capability in about five years. Horizon is running it today, generating revenue across a pipeline of customers in defense, pharmaceuticals, and financial services.

Horizon’s founder is Dr. Emiliano Santarnecchi, who founded and led the Precision Neuroscience and Neuromodulation Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He has published 200 peer-reviewed papers, received funding from DARPA and the National Institutes of Health, and was the first to increase fluid intelligence—the ability to reason through unfamiliar problems—in humans through direct brain stimulation. He also co-founded Sinaptica Therapeutics, which is developing non-invasive brain stimulation for Alzheimer’s disease and is another JLS holding.