The post Announcing the BGI24 Summit appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post The DFINITY Foundation and SingularityNET launch joint AI Initiative appeared first on SingularityNET.

Staking, the process which allows holders to generate rewards on their holdings, will launch later this month, and will allow users to contribute to the growth and adoption of Cardano.

The post SingularityNET launches staking for AGIX tokens on the Cardano blockchain appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post Forest Hills Lab’s Merger With Awakening Health Lab to Revolutionize Healthcare Delivery and Management appeared first on SingularityNET.

Longevity focused biotechnology startup Rejuve Biotech is using AI and data from long-lived animal models to develop novel therapeutics designed to help people live longer and healthier. The company holds exclusive rights to the data from so-called Methuselah flies – long-lived fruit flies that have been specifically bred for remarkable longevity.

The post Do long-lived flies hold the key to extending human longevity? appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post VeChain and SingularityNET team up on AI to fight climate change appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post SingularityNET Announces Strategic Partnership with EARTHwise appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post Leading AI Researchers Launch Community to Combat AI Safety Threats appeared first on SingularityNET.

As artificial intelligence continues its rapid advance, one word has computer scientists and science fiction fans waiting with bated breath: singularity. 

The post Achieving the Singularity is ‘All About Progress’ appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post Rejuve Launches AI-powered App To Remove Privilege From The Fight Against Ageing appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post AI will help realize the true vision the Metaverse hopes to achieve appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post At Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Conference, DRLearner is Released as Open-Source Code appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post How the Blockchain Could Break Big Tech’s Hold on A.I. appeared first on SingularityNET.

However, in this day and age, a startup raising a lot of money in an ICO is not really of interest, at least to many. This is part and parcel of the crazy, unregulated, crypto world these days. But what is interesting is what SingularityNET actually plans to become.

Dr. Ben Goertzel, the CEO
and founder, has a grand vision.

SingularityNET brings AI and blockchain together to create a decentralized open market for AIs. The implications are that it could let anyone monetize AI, allowing companies, organizations, and developers to buy and sell AI algorithms at scale, thus lowering costs and increasing the capabilities of the AIs. Eventually, the plan is to plug Hanson Robots’ “Sophia” robot literally into SingularityNET’s network in order to power its brain. If this sounds like a Sci-Fi movie, that’s because a lot of Sci-Fi has exactly this plot line.

In an interview, I asked him how it will all work:

“Proprietary marketplaces exist, like the Amazon Web Services for instance. What we’re creating here is a decentralized marketplace, more like BitTorrent. There’s no central dictator deciding what gets in there. Anyone can put an AI online, wrap it in our API, announce it to the network and any business that needs AI as a service can request it.

“Then you need a good reputation system to grade the best AIs with a high rating. We need blockchain to let us do this in a peer to peer, decentralized way. P2P software that is reliable and not easily hackable and involves payment, but it would still need a distributed ledger. BitTorrent doesn’t involve payment or Identity management or high security, which is why we are doing this on blockchain.

“AI processing is compute time sensitive. So we chose the AI Adaptability platform, which plays two roles. One is that it’s one of the many AI tools that we will use to build some initial AI services in the network, just the way Apple also sells its own apps. We will put some cool tools in there. The other role is closer to the infrastructure.

“We want to make the system so that the AI layer is independent of what blockchain we are using. Our prototype uses Ethereum, but this is too slow. So we want to be able to swap out the blockchain technology easily. So, the smart contracts need to be expressed in an abstract way which is independent of the blockchain we are using. And AI Adaptability’s logical language works well for this.

“If an AI in the marketplace is not useful it will get a lower rating. But in this sort of market something doesn’t have to be useful to everyone. So for instance, you could have an algorithm that was only useful to coffee farmers in Africa. I mean, Amazon Cloud doesn’t offer that because coffee farmers are not high on many of its lists to address. But it could still be valuable to some people. Like coffee farmers!

“It’s like having Elance, but the AI is doing a service, not a person.

Could it be scalable? AI algos aren’t invented in big tech companies anyway, they are invented by academics and students. So if you have a way for the inventors to wrap their algorithms in a decent API, then you allow the creators to benefit, rather than them having to create a startup and sell it to a big company.

“Instead of putting their code on GitHub, they can put it on SingularityNet and it can be found by businesses and then they can get paid for it. On the end-user side, we need to get businesses into the habit of connecting their code to SingularityNet APIs rather than Amazon’s APIs or startups which have a nasty habit of disappearing when the startup gets bought.

“Much of my own motivation is to get a greater level of AI behind all sorts of software like the Hanson Robots, using it as a showcase of the SingularityNET. As this gets smarter we are going to point Sofia’s brain to SingularityNET, moving it from the Hanson cloud into the SingularityNET, such as using computer vision. We should have some substantial improvements by August next year. We gain from the ability for anyone around the world to improve Sofia’s mind. We can’t hire all these enthusiasts but we can give them an easy way to contribute to Sofia’s mind.

“So a kid could make millions of dollars form putting their computer vision AI into our market, for instance.”

It’s a very, very big vision. Look out Amazon is all I can say…

The post SingularityNET’s Ben Goertzel has a grand vision for the future of AI appeared first on SingularityNET.

Remember Sophia, the humanoid robot who was granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia? From the general media hubbub to the discussion surrounding the Saudi government’s treatment of women’s rights, the landmark event caused quite a stir across the web.

But behind all that buzz, SingularityNET, whose artificial intelligence technology powers the robot built by Hanson Robotics, has been working to completely revolutionize web as we understand it.

What is SingularityNET?

In some sense, the premise behind SingularityNET is fairly simple.

“SingularityNET is a decentralized open market for AI,” SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel said in an interview with the author. “It’s a product aimed at becoming a bridge between AI developers and business users.”

Thinking of it this way helps keep your head somewhat attached to your body when you start trying to imagine a decentralized, interconnected network of AIs that can not only be purchased and shared via blockchain technology—they can actually learn from each other.

AI is an umbrella category that houses four broad types, encapsulating a wide field of study that includes subsets you may have heard more of recently (ie. machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing). AI is already a $233 billion industry, and some estimates predict it will reach $3 trillion by 2025. We encounter AI every day, though much of what emerges from the field isn’t immediately obvious to the user—the point is to seamlessly optimize existing systems. This is also why we’re starting to see a “hockey stick” curve of AI acquisitions over the past few years—congregating these systems in a handful of major corporations, who then resell AI packages.

Even though AI changes our lives by the day, it’s a fragmented field. Many aren’t able to see or learn from the work others are doing, unless they happen to be working in a company like Google, Facebook, or Salesforce (and even then), and there’s no discoverability for AI inventors.

SingularityNET addresses this visibility issue, enabling everyday users—from small-business owners to brand managers and beyond—to connect with AIs and AI developers who might have already developed the perfect solution.

“Say someone has a computer system doing something, and they would like AI to do it better,” Goertzel said. “Unless you’re Google or Tencent, you’re probably not going to build your own AI—you’re going to be making your software grab AI from some software package or API. Those are the customers.”

But it can be difficult for small teams to be sure they’re picking the right AI—and if they’re running on a lean budget, this can end up being a costly choice. SingularityNET helps matchmake these customers with the developers who might have been working on AIs with niche purposes.

“A lot of niche markets will be served by a decentralized network in the same way eBay serves a lot of weird niche markets for buying stuff that Walmart doesn’t serve, because in a decentralized market the overhead cost is very low,” Goertzel said. “Someone who makes AI to serve some niche purpose can reach the customers who want something meeting that niche purpose.”

AI is already integrating into many existing industries, so the potential impact of a barrier-free global AI marketplace extends far beyond applications in tech companies.

“It could be shoe store that wants machine learning to predict what shoes people are going to buy next year, it could be an accounting company that wants AI to spot errors in their line items,” Goertzel said. “Or it could be something sexier like a robotics company that wants AI to help their robot navigate. It could be a hospital that wants AI to help a conversation system to keep chronically ill people company or a diagnostics system to figure out why some medicines work for some and not others.”

AIs Learning from Other AIs

This is where SingularityNET really starts to sound like science fiction—even though it’s about to become our reality.

“What makes it more interesting is that the AIs can also exchange data and make requests of each other,” Goertzel said. “So then the AIs interconnect in a network of AIs, like an economy of minds—a big meta-mind out of all these AIs talking to each other.”

This is facilitated through the Ethereum blockchain, on which SingularityNET is built. For a quick refresher on blockchain, check out these primers. For the purposes of understanding how it fits into the picture of SingularityNET, the most important thing to know is that blockchain allows buyers and sellers to interact directly, without middlemen.

“The big a-ha moment was realizing that this same framework that enables this nice business story of disintermediating the gap between producers and consumers of AI is also actually the rights structure for leading to the emergence of higher degrees of [artificial] general intelligence,” Goertzel said. “If you want to have a system in which general intelligence can emerge, you want it to be—at the high level—more self-organizing and growing and adaptive, like a biological system. You want something in which all sorts of different AIs can be placed, and they can interact with each other liberally, and where the mechanisms for their interactions themselves can be improved and changed and proposed by the participants of the system.”

Goertzel, who notes how biological organisms are themselves self-organizing information systems, believes that an economy like SingularityNET facilitates optimal growth on a global scale.

“You want a big messy system that’s growing without the central controller, with a bunch of different parts interacting with each other, and where the parts that fit well into the whole network prevail and the parts that don’t will not get as much attention,” Goertzel said. “That’s kind of what Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer was talking about with ‘Society of Mind,’ and then [with SingularityNET] you’re talking about an ‘Economy of Minds.’ The existence of the economy means that AIs that are really useful in that society will get more resources and ones that aren’t will get less.”

AGI Token Sale

In many ways, SingularityNET is the summation of Goertzel’s life work. In the late 1990s, he founded a company called WebMind, with the goal of turning the world wide web into a self-organizing brain. But the idea proved too early, and WebMind was a casualty of the dot-com crash.

A decade later, Bitcoin introduced blockchain technology to the world, gaining traction in the mainstream with each passing year. During that time, Goertzel worked as Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics (the same company that built Sophia) alongside David Hanson, now the Robotics Lead of SingularityNET. The notion of something like SingularityNET had been in his head a long time, and when that coalesced with the possibilities of blockchain, it all clicked.

“It seemed like many of the same things we want for fostering the emergence of AGI are the same things you want for making a more sort of democratic and broadly beneficial network of AIs,” Goertzel said. “Seeing that those two things are achieved by the same goals…it’s one of those things that’s extremely obvious in hindsight.”

By building SingularityNET on the blockchain, Goertzel has the opportunity to create a decentralized system optimized for ease, reliability, and security.

“The core thing that blockchain gives us is a very easy-to-use, scalable, robust, and secure tool for creating a system of agents living all around the Internet on different people’s machines, which can operate in a trustless, self-organizing way,” Goertzel said. “You can have a reputation system where agents rate each other based on how well they did, and then you have built-in ways to protect against gaming and faking that reputation system. You can have agents pay each other for microtransactions without needing to incur the overhead of using Visa or Mastercard or bank transfers.”

Blockchain answered one of the main issues WebMind ran up against two decades ago: the relationship between cost and functionality.

“Back then encryption was insanely expensive, you know, how do you handle data privacy?” Goertzel said. “Now homomorphic encryption integrated in the blockchain let’s you flexibly expose one aspect of data to one customer, one aspect to another customer.”

To that end, SingularityNET announced its Token Sale for AGI Token on Nov. 28, already receiving over $150M in pledged orders from approximately 10,000 registrants, with institutional backing from Blockchain Global, DigitalX, and Taas.Fund. Due to how oversubscribed the sale has become, SingularityNET has extended their token sale through 2018.

Because AGI Token is an ERC20 token, ‘smart contracts’ will be an integral part of SingularityNET, allowing not only people to transact with other people, but AIs to transact and cooperate with other AIs.

“If the peripheral node that’s directly serving a business—like summarizing a document, recognizing patterns in a picture, asking a question—if that’s accepting currency, it then has to dispense currency to other nodes to which it outsources work,” Goertzel said. “The node that recognizes errors in some line items in a spreadsheet, when it finds a word it doesn’t recognize in some column, it wants to outsource analysis of the meaning of that word to another AI agent—it should pay that AI agent for that. So then you need a token for internal transactions between the AIs.”

The post AI Is The Future Of Computing, And SingularityNET Is The Future Of AI appeared first on SingularityNET.

The post Cisco, SingularityNET to Decentralize Artificial Intelligence via Blockchain appeared first on SingularityNET.

One of the main themes from this Summit was the need for complex systems models such as agent-based models to inform policy. During this pandemic, at times, every policymaker around the world felt they were going into this pandemic without the information that they needed, even though we’ve dealt with other outbreaks such as SARS, MERS, etc..

The post AI Can Help To Inform Coronavirus Policy appeared first on SingularityNET.

Per the release, the collaboration will at first focus on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Computer Vision (CV) and model training. SingularityNET notes that the scope of the partnership is expected to expand to multiple industries and initiatives in the future.

The announcement has been made shortly after SingularityNET officially launched a beta version of its Ethereum-based decentralized marketplace on Thursday, Feb. 28. In January last year, the company also announced a partnership with agriculture-focused blockchain startup Hara at the World Web Forum.

Ping An is reportedly the world’s most valuable insurance company, it serves 170 million customers, and ranked tenth in the Forbes Global 2000 list of world’s largest public companies. As Cointelegraph reported in November last year, Ping An and the Sanya municipal government also signed a strategic cooperation agreement for “Smart City” construction involving blockchain.

The press release notes that Ping An’s “One Minute Clinics” for medical consultations, which are unstaffed and use AI, are already in use in eight Chinese cities.

During the same month, Cointelegraph also reported that Ping An’s banking subsidiary Ping An Bank will launch a boutique bank using blockchain, cloud services and Internet of Things (IoT) tech.

The post Chinese Insurance Giant Ping An Partners With Decentralized AI Startup SingularityNET appeared first on SingularityNET.

Within the new partnership, SingularityNET will incorporate AI algorithms and solutions in Domino’s operations to improve its supply chain processes and logistics in Malaysia and Singapore, a SingularityNET press release shared with Cointelegraph notes.

According to the announcement, the strategic partnership aims to improve the food industry giant’s business operations by conducting feasibility studies, running AI-focused workshops and developing new algorithms specific to the firm’s needs.

New AI features are set to be implemented via the SingularityNET Beta platform, an Ethereum (ETH) blockchain-based decentralized marketplace launched in February 2019.

According to the press release, Domino’s Pizza Malaysia & Singapore has more than 260 stores with a total staff of more than 4,000. As Cointelegraph reported previously, customers can pay for Domino’s Pizza with bitcoin (BTC) as payment though services such as PizzaForCoins.

Recently, SingularityNET partnered with Chinese insurance giant in order to deliver its AI algorithms focusing on Optical Character Recognition, Computer Vision and model training.

As well, SingularityNET entered into another partnership with agriculture-focused blockchain startup Hara to apply blockchain to provide farmers in Indonesia with data such as grain prices, soil quality and land ownership details.

The post Domino’s Pizza Malaysia & Singapore to Integrate DLT-Based AI for Logistics appeared first on SingularityNET.

But they’re only good at their one trade—a key reason why Sophia the robot, the first robot citizen, isn’t actually as smart as a human. The company that makes Sophia, Hanson Robotics, has become adept at linking different, highly-specific algorithms like image recognition and speech transcription in a way that mimics what humans might be doing when we hear a question and formulate a response.

To build a better robot, Hanson Robotics needs more and better code. To do this, Hanson executives have launched a side venture that will allow independent coders to be compensated for their AI’s labor, or have their AI trade its own labor in return for work done by other coders’ AIs. Called SingularityNET, it’s a marketplace built on a blockchain, the technology underpinning Bitcoin, that allows AI systems to barter with each other.

“There’s this vastly underutilized collection of AI code out there,” says Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and CTO of Hanson Robotics. “It’s a more automated way to take your code, wrap it in an API, and have people pay attention.”

Going off the analogy that AIs are artisan workers, imagine SingularityNET as the virtual village square. Artisans—the AI—barter or exchange money for different services, and it’s all recorded on SingularityNET’s blockchain. For instance, an algorithm that finds objects in video, but cannot process the accompanying audio in a video, might request that task from others on SingularityNET. That request would come with an offer for a portion of the blockchain’s currency, or an equal exchange of its own video analysis services.

Goertzel says the ability to “stack” machine learning algorithms like this, where compute power is bartered like money and decisions are made by constellations of cooperative but disparate algorithms, has the ability to create more robust AI systems. These systems aren’t smarter because the algorithms themselves are more efficient, but because they’re orchestrated and verified by this central blockchain.

Developers today already integrate multiple AI algorithms from cloud service providers like Google, IBM, and Clarifai into their apps and services without a blockchain, but SingularityNET would theoretically allow complex stacks of algorithms to configure themselves. Plus, the entire process would be recorded on a blockchain.

SingularityNET hopes to launch the token—the currency used between AIs called the artificial general intelligence coin—on Nov. 29. As with other initial coin offerings, it’s a largely unregulated way to grab a ton of cash, even if the Kurzweilian branding doesn’t woo independent AI developers..

The post In the future, algorithms may barter between each other to make better decisions appeared first on SingularityNET.