Pathway Launches a New “Post-Transformer” Architecture That Paves the Way for Autonomous AI

Audio By Carbonatix

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 1, 2025--

Pathway, the data company building live AI that thinks in real-time like humans do, is today introducing Baby Dragon Hatchling (BDH), a new “post-Transformer” architecture that addresses one of the most significant barriers to autonomous artificial intelligence (AI): the inability to generalize over time.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251001665931/en/

View of actual BDH model structure. BDH behaves like a population of connected, cooperating neurons. The modular structure of the neuron network is not “engineered” into blocks serving different functions but emerges spontaneously during training. This emergence appears to be the key to intelligence. It resembles the behavior of the neocortex - the outer layer of the brain, present only in mammals, and responsible for higher-order cognitive functions such as perception, memory, learning, and decision-making.

Generalization over time – the capacity to sustain reasoning, learn from experience, and make predictions based on new information – is a fundamental property of human intelligence. Today’s transformer-based models, by contrast, are powerful but static: they excel at pattern-matching past data, but have limited ability to extend their reasoning into new contexts.

In the new paper, “ The Missing Link Between the Transformer and Models of the Brain,” Pathway has scientifically and formally mapped how intelligence emerges in the brain, enabling it to create BDH, an artificial reasoning system with a brain-like execution model.

BDH forms a modular structure similar to a network of neurons in the brain. It emerges spontaneously during training and resembles the behavior of the neocortex, the outer layer of the brain present only in mammals, which is responsible for higher-order cognitive functions such as perception, memory, learning, and decision-making. It emerges spontaneously during training and resembles the behavior of the neocortex, the outer layer of the brain present only in mammals, which is responsible for higher-order cognitive functions such as perception, memory, learning, and decision-making (see image for a view of the actual BDH model structure).

In the BDH architecture, data inputs steer a population of artificial neurons, which build knowledge and draw inferences based on their interactions. This new approach enables a scale-free model, which can reason for long periods of time and behaves predictably even as new and unforeseen information is dynamically added to the model.

“Humans learn to reason through experience. Current artificial intelligence doesn’t. We focused on mapping natural human reasoning when solving the issue of generalization over time. We asked ourselves: what is AI missing to mimic human brain function?” said Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO and co-founder of Pathway.

“We discovered that to achieve generalization over time, we needed a completely new architecture. That’s why BDH is not an incremental improvement on transformer-based architecture, but a paradigm shift,” commented Adrian Kosowski, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Pathway.

The research details how Pathway’s BDH architecture supports a number of benefits over transformer-based architectures. These include, but are not limited to:

• Generalization over time. The increased length of the chain-of-thought supports generalization over time, overcoming a significant barrier to autonomous intelligence.

• Predictability. Unlike today’s “black box” systems, BDH ensures a provable risk level. The scale-free nature of BDH means that it will continue to reason in the way you expect over a long period.

• Safety. Shows how to overcome Bostrom’s famous “Paperclip Factory” thought experiment (the risk of a superintelligent AI running on a “harmless goal” malfunctioning and causing harm when running autonomously for a long time).

• Composability. Multiple BDH-based systems can be “glued” together, resulting in emergent capabilities, similar to how a bilingual child develops fluency across two languages.

• Scarce data. The increased length of the chain-of-thought compared to transformer-based architectures means that BDH can reason for a longer time and draw better inferences on smaller datasets.

• Competitive performance: BDH not only performs competitively on general-purpose hardware, but it also has the potential for faster inference on specialized AI processors. This, in turn, has the potential to reduce the cost of reasoning and AI in enterprise deployments, and most dramatically, to generate tokens in a single long-running model with significantly lower latency.

“Generalization over time is the foundation for safe and autonomous reasoning,” continued Stamirowska. “With BDH, we now have a scalable model that can sustain long-horizon reasoning, expanding the AI market in enterprise.”

To accelerate product development, Pathway has partnered with industry leaders, NVIDIA and AWS. AWS is the company’s preferred cloud vendor and will provide Pathway with its compute power needs.

For more information on Pathway, please visit https://pathway.com/. For interest in joining our team, please visit: https://pathway.com/careers/.

About Pathway

Pathway is shaking the foundations of artificial intelligence by introducing the world’s first post-transformer model that adapts and thinks just like humans.

Pathway’s breakthrough architecture outperforms Transformer and provides the enterprise with full visibility into how the model works. Combining the foundational model with the fastest data processing engine on the market, Pathway enables enterprises to move beyond incremental optimization and toward truly contextualized, experience-driven intelligence. The company is trusted by organizations such as NATO, La Poste, and Formula 1 racing teams.

Pathway is led by co-founder & CEO Zuzanna Stamirowska, a complexity scientist who created a team consisting of AI pioneers, including CTO Jan Chorowski who was the first person to apply Attention to speech and worked with Nobel laureate Goeff Hinton at Google Brain, as well as CSO Adrian Kosowski, a leading computer scientist and quantum physicist who obtained his PhD at the age of 20.

The company is backed by leading investors and advisors, including Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the Transformer (“the T” in ChatGPT) and a key researcher behind OpenAI’s reasoning models. Pathway is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251001665931/en/

CONTACT: SBS Comms

[email protected]

KEYWORD: CALIFORNIA UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: SOFTWARE RESEARCH HARDWARE DATA MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SCIENCE BIOTECHNOLOGY NEUROLOGY OTHER TECHNOLOGY OTHER SCIENCE HEALTH

SOURCE: Pathway

Copyright Business Wire 2025.

PUB: 10/01/2025 09:00 AM/DISC: 10/01/2025 09:01 AM

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251001665931/en