Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’

The fuzziness of the proposal didn’t bother Jeff Bezos. After reading Williams’ two-pager, he chipped in $50 million. Other funding came from Lux Capital and Google Ventures, among others. Bezos then almost doubled his initial stake and told Reardon he’d have given more if they’d asked. Now with a war chest of $500 million and a reported valuation of $2.5 billion, Flourish just needs to invent a new way to do AI. Thomas Reardon IV doesn’t use his first name–too many Toms in the family tree. “My wife calls me Reardon, everyone calls me Reardon,” he says. He grew up one of 18 kids in a working-class family and dropped out of the University of New Hampshire at age 15. From there his résumé goes bonkers: He becomes a teenage programming wizard, gets hired to help build Microsoft’s first web browser, and starts and sells a wireless tech company. Next he goes to Columbia University for a degree in classics, gets into neuroscience and ultimately earns a doctorate in it (also from Columbia). He starts another company with some classmates, develops a mind-control wristband, gets acquired by Meta, and works there for six years. (The wristband comes with Meta’s latest smart glasses.) But Reardon was dissatisfied with how companies, including Meta, were building cutting-edge AI. Matching the brain’s ability to learn and energy parsimony isn’t a new idea. Both IBM and Intel have released neuromorphic chips inspired by the brain’s architecture. UC Berkeley computer scientist Ben Recht, who is a Flourish adviser, recalls that scientists decades ago were into neuromorphic approaches to software. Then LLMs took over. “They call those neural nets, but there's nothing brain-like happening there,” Recht says. Reardon convinced Williams, the Amazon exec, whom he knew from their time at Microsoft, to join him. Another early recruit was Greg Wayne, a longtime researcher at DeepMind, who heads Project Astra, Google’s AI assistant initiative. “I didn't know if they could achieve their goal, but I thought it would lead to interestingness, which probably will be useful,” Wayne says. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis fought to keep Wayne, and they forged an arrangement where Wayne kept his job but would spend 20 percent of his time at Flourish.