@vclay reviews the Thousand Brain’s progress in Q2 2026 and outlines the team’s priorities for Q3.
This update covers research advances, including integrating the saliency policy and 2D Sensor Module into Monty, combining hypothesis channels, improvements and fixes to compositional modeling, and a new compositional dataset.
On the platform side, the team made progress on the goal of the MuJoCo integration and Python upgrade, simplifying configurations, removing experiment artifacts from Monty, and expanding debugging capabilities with the new tbp.teleop tool.
Community highlights include ensuring all documentation is up to date and updating the future works sections to clearly label beginner-friendly tasks. We also published new videos and papers, had 180 merged PRs to tbp.monty, and welcomed @brothman as our new Developer Advocate.
Looking ahead, @vclay shares the team’s Q3 priorities across research, platform, and community projects.
Main Video
0:00 Q2 Review and Q3 Planning for 2026
0:08 Q2 2026 - Review
0:21 Progress on Open Theory Questions
1:52 Research Progress - Saliency Policy Integrated into Monty
2:27 Research Progress - 2D Sensor Module Integrated into Monty
2:49 Research Progress - Hypothesis Channel Combination
3:00 Research Progress - New Compositional Object and Sticker Dataset Integrated in Monty
3:09 Research Progress - Compositional Modeling Fixes
3:23 Research Progress - Top-Down Connections/Parent to Child Orientation Not Started, Remains on the List for Next Quarter
3:30 Research Progress - Compositional Modeling Is Working Well
4:14 Platform Progress - MuJoCo Integration and Python Upgrade
4:53 Platform Progress - Freeing the Monty Class of Experiment Artifacts
5:19 Platform Progress - Making Monty Easier to Configure
5:47 Community Progress - Updating All Future Work Sections & Clearly Labeling Beginner Tasks
6:30 Community Progress - Documentation Updates
6:57 Collaborations & Communications
7:51 YouTube Publications
7:58 Neural Computation Publications
8:20 Merged 180 PRs to tbp.monty
8:34 Further Developments on 16 Other Repositories Related to Monty’s Infrastructure
9:01 Published Lazyconfigs Tool
9:09 Wrote & Published tbp.teleop, A Powerful Debugging and Visualization Tool
9:22 Made a Larger Compositional Dataset for Monty Evaluation
9:26 Brainstormed and Read on Other Topics
9:32 Welcome to the Team, Benji! Our New Developer Advocate
9:42 Q3 2026 - Priorities
9:55 Q3 Open Theory Priorities - Attention
10:15 Q3 Open Theory Priorities - Re-establish Clarity on Object Behavior Modeling
10:35 Q3 Research Priorities - Improving Monty’s Ability to Model Compositional Objects
10:50 Q3 Research Priorities - Adding Symmetry Representations and Communicating Child-Parent Relative Orientations
10:57 Q3 Research Priorities - Adding Attention and Model-Free Segmentations to Focus on an Object Until Recognized
11:15 Q3 Research Priorities - Adding Model-Based Policies and Attention for Compositionality
11:23 Q3 Research Priorities - Generating V1 of Compositionality Benefits Figures
11:43 Q3 Research Priorities - Adding Top-Down Connections into Monty
11:59 Q3 Platform Priorities - Upgrade Python, Wrap Up MuJoCo Integration, Habitat and Conda Removal
12:29 Q3 Platform Priorities - Remove Experiment Artifacts from the Platform
12:37 Q3 Platform Priorities - Replace Monty Data Logs with Telemetry Streams
12:49 Q3 Community Priorities - Write and Publish a Two-Year TBP Report, Summarizing the Last Two Years