Nov 20 (Reuters) - Numenta, a company with backing from

the Gates Foundation, on Wednesday released an open-source AI

model it hopes will require less energy and data to create

intelligent machines than existing technologies.

Numenta was co-founded by Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm

Computing in the 1990s, which in turn invented the Palm Pilot.

Hawkins' deepest academic interest is neuroscience, which showed

up in the Palm Pilot's handwriting recognition software that

leveraged an earlier era of artificial intelligence.

While most of today's popular AI systems are roughly modeled

on human brains with a technology called neural networks,

Numenta has a different idea of how the brain works and hopes to

persuade AI researchers to try its approach.

Most current AI systems ingest huge amounts of static data -

such as massive libraries of text or images - and run that

through thousands or even tens of thousands of computing chips.

After weeks or months of computing using vast amounts of

electricity, the AI system is trained to generate responses to

human queries.

Numenta believes that such training can be a more constant

process, where brain cells gather small bits of information from

senses such as sight and touch and constantly develop models of

the world that can be modified on the fly as conditions change,

like a young child learning a new toy.

The company says the approach can be applied to robots that

learn to navigate the world and other types of knowledge like

writing. On Wednesday, it will release open source computer code

to let other companies and researchers try its approach.

Other firms such as Meta Platforms ( META ) have also made

their AI technology freely available. That has helped Meta catch

up to rivals such as OpenAI, but has also led to the use of

Meta's technology by the Chinese military.

Subutai Ahmad, Numenta's chief executive, said the company

will closely monitor how its technology is used once it becomes

public.

"The technology is still early, and the way we deal with

this will depend on the exact way the technology matures," Ahmad

told Reuters. "These are important issues that we need to think

about."