The company’s first product, Zeus, is being developed as an operating system that sits beneath large language models and controls how those models interact with machines, software and other systems. Metacognition says the architecture adds persistent memory, reasoning and guardrails around what an AI system is allowed to do.
One of the company’s longer-term goals is to allow non-specialists to teach robot hardware useful tasks through verbal instructions and feedback rather than conventional programming. The same software is also being aimed at complex industrial systems, with early simulations involving the management of open-cut mines and electricity grids through natural-language commands.
Metacognition was founded in 2026 by Australian AI researchers Anton van den Hengel, Stephen Gould and Paul Dalby. Van den Hengel is chief scientist of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, while Gould has held research roles spanning academia and industry.
