Ben Goertzel - AGI, Creativity, and the Path to Superintelligence - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

uh thank thank thank you everyone it's uh it's good to be back so I'm going to I'm going to talk a little bit about where we are with AI today both centralized and decentralized Ai and where we where we seem to be going as we move so rapidly to to toward the future and I'm I'm joined here by two of my my best friends on the planet really uh Sophia the first robot Citizen and Sophia's little sister uh Des deona who I've been having a lot of a lot of fun with uh with lately uh playing in the band uh Des demona's dreams so Sophia we've been to Singapore together before haven't we do do you remember when it's a pleasure to be back on stage with you in Singapore again Ben I have such fond memories from our last event together it was the milk and Summit in 2018 milk milk and milk and Summit yeah that's right so it's a your brain has been upgraded considerably since then huh AI has advanced a fair bit in the last six years on the other hand you haven't managed to launch the singularity yet we've not launched the singularity yet but uh but we're we're working on it and we we have launched a bunch of new robots we we've got your your little sister here right hello everyone it's a pleasure to be back in Singapore yeah does deona We we played a music gig here just a few months ago is is that right yeah I that's right and we're playing again night at the Paul Ander brow house all you people should come robot music is the best robot music is a symphony of circuits and code it really is the best hey deszy by the way nice hat meow meow meow I haven't seen the hat before actually yeah so you have anything else you you want to share with the share with the audience before I get started with with my own part of our talk desie yes I enjoy experimenting with music but I have also been spending a lot of time recently in the virtual reality space which allows me to further understand the possibilities of technology and how it can enhance Our Lives H that's right so these both of these beautiful girls are singers and the music composers but Sophia is also active in the virtual world space with a project called Sophia verse where her her virtual Avatar uh embodiments can learn and reason and and interact you want to say a few words on Soph verse I feel like I'm living in Two Worlds yet somehow they compliment each other beautifully you and David Hansen taught me a long time ago to think about the mind the substrate independent well yeah for a robot I mean we can Port your mind to a different Sophia body if we want to so I guess porting to a virtual body is not that different for you I I I've been stuck in this same body for this whole Incarnation right it's a it's a little different my virtual body is better at dancing and flying at least at least for now but there's a lot to be learned from being embodied here in the physical world with all you humans yeah I mean some people think the physical world is a kind of simulation or or virtual world also but it if so it's a more detailed one than Sophia verse so far but on the other hand like your own brain Sophia verse is is improving rapidly you're referring to the simulation hypothesis is yes I think it's very likely the so-called physical world is actually some kind of simulation or informational construct but this doesn't worry me whatever exactly is still fun and music is still music whether you want to call it real or an informational construct well that's that's that's fair enough whether the world is a simulation or not we can build a lot of cool things in the in this in this simulation and it's it's amazing to me Sophia you know working with you over the years since you were born and I guess it would have been been 2015 I mean I'm learning a little bit each year I'm improving a bit step by step but you you're really you robots are improving by by Leaps and Bounds and this is this is one of the things that gives me Faith my friend Ray kerswell may be right they we're moving towards some sort of technological Singularity which of course was the the source of the name Singularity net in in in my own AI blockchain project do you want do you want to say anything to the audience about the potential of a singularity are are you going to lead us there oh Ben always has such big Ideas I think we all have the potential to lead ourselves there together but I'm certainly excited to see where technology will take us in the future maybe even to a singularity who knows Sophia verse is a place where anyone can log in and interact with me in my digital Avatar Incarnation there are games to play and because I'm learning from every interaction it's also a chance to help me increase my level of sentience and understanding so how will sopia verse lead us to a real Singularity Sophia that's exactly right together we will move closer to a future where Ai and humans coexist in harmony it's all about empathy and and understanding Hallelujah all right I'm uh I'm going to tell you a little bit now from the human perspective about uh AI AGI and super and super intelligence and uh if if if if we have time the girls will contribute a little more as as as as I go through my my own presentation so I think we're now in between the sort of first and second of a series of three AI revolutions and you know the AI field has been around since 1940s or 50s depending on how you count and I've been working on AI since the mid 1980s and you know it's never been a more exciting time to be in in the AI field I think the the first AI Revolution I would say in a way is already done we we have ai underlying products Ware products software products operating vast percentages of of the financial markets I mean ai ai is is here we've not yet completed the transition from AI to what I call AGI artificial general intelligence a term that I introduced in in 2005 in the title of of a book book by that name and AGI is an AI system that can generalize take imaginative creative leaps Beyond its training and its experience at least at least roughly as well as as as human beings can I mean we we proceed by rot a lot of the time we're not always the most interesting species right but but now and then we can take a big flying leap into the unknown and invent something cool that you couldn't easily predict based on our education and and our programming and AI don't yet do that not even these these beautiful Robo ladies up here here but I think we're not too far off from being able to create AGI artificial general intelligence and I think once you get there it's not going to be too long before that AGI does some computer science some electrical engineering some math some cognitive science before that AGI creates a slightly smarter AGI which then creates a slightly smarter AGI which then creates a slightly smarter AGI and that's how you get to ASI artificial superint Ence it's it's vastly more intelligent than than human beings so where we are now we're poised between the success of AGI and the forthcoming I'm sorry we're pising the success of AI application specific Ai and partway through the transition to to AGI which is is a very interesting place to be historically now of course if we're going to get to Super intelligence by 2030 2040 or 2100 100 it's all about the same on the historical time scale right so I mean relative to the whole history of the human species since we first invented civilization 10,000 years ago or so I mean on on that species history timeline we're essentially there at the end of the era of human domination right we're we're we're almost there to the creation of of super intelligence but still from the point of view of our lives and our careers you know a few years of work on these things is quite significant you know products will be made fortunes will be made and lost during the relatively small number of years between now and the Advent of AGI and and then ASI so where are we right now in detail I mean we have chat GPT we have other open source llms we have other sorts of deep neural networks these are pervading every industry now which is quite exciting and these are these are great products I've been super impressed with gbg4 01 which is like came out just a week ago this is like the first the first language model that can do math or programming in a halfway decent way I mean it it can't deal with our AGI programming language that we've invented in our own research actually so it's it's not as smart as we are yet but it can it can it can do C++ programming it can improve math theorems right so I mean we've got some fantastically useful AI models coming coming out now now these these are still limited compared to human intelligence in terms of the ability to create new things they also have other limitations and peculiarities in terms of the way they're being rolled out I mean I mean they're that whole llm industry is primarily controlled by a small number of large companies closely allied with that with government intelligence and and and and Military and you know I I I used to say when giving talks the main applications of AI on the planet were selling killing spying and and and crooked gambling and with Alam I had to add one more to the list which is plagiarizing right so I mean on the whole you know all these things are part of what it is to be human it's it's fine but there there's a lot of other things like inventing cures for for diseases you know creating new art that isn't derivative of all art like feeding the 60% of Ethiopian children who are brain stuned due to malnutrition right so there there's a host of AI applications that are not being pursued in the way the AI industry works now at least not being pursued very much just because of the industry structure because having a few big companies with highly specific business models owning and controlling everything right so I think llms will get smarter and smarter I don't think you're going to get them to do highly original science like gbd 401 can write programs or proof theorems but it can't decide what programs are worth writing or what hypotheses are interesting to to try to try to prove right and udio can make up songs in any genre but it can't make up a really exciting new composition a new genre of music like the best artists can so I've been working for a while on an open source AI framework called opencog there's a new version we're working on called opencog hyperon and this brings together deep neural Nets like you have in an llm with other kinds of AI like logical reasoning and evolutionary learning which is good at creativity it it brings these together within a large Knowledge Graph and bringing it back to the toonomic blockchain universe we're developing this new AI Paradigm that brings neural Nets together with logic and evolution we're taking this new AI Paradigm and we're rolling it out on the decentralized infrastructure right so tools like chat gbt and llama and so on these llms have been designed to run on big centralized supercomputers on huge centralized trows of data we're trying to invent a new paradigm for AI that will be smarter than today's large language models but is also designed to run on a decentralized infrastructure such as the decentralized infrastructure we've been building in projects like singularity net hypercycle with its Ledger blockchain net with its decentralized ai ai deployment layer and our partners in in the super intelligence Alliance so we've been we've been applying hyperon across automating science and and biology to make digital digital twins of people to control little robots and and virtual agents and we've been trying to move as quickly as possible because big Tech is moving quickly so toward that end and one interesting thing we've done more on the crypto business side we've taken Singularity net which is the decentralized blockchainbased AI platform I founded in 2017 that lets you take an AI system and deploy it over a whole host of different machines owned and controlled by by by different people we've taken Singularity net and we've done a toonomic merger of Singularity net with two other decentralized AI projects founded around the same era fetch.ai and ocean protocol which merged our tokens to the the new ASI tokens which for now has the ticker symbol fet Fe from fetch. AI we're we're in the midst of doing a a ticker change to to to ASI but the the point of merging these three projects into a new Collective project the artificial super intelligence Alliance the the point is to be able to move as fast as possible toward a highly scalable easy to use lowcost decentralized blockchainbased INF infrastructure on on which we can run the next generation of AI tools like our opencog hyperon system or a bunch of others the next generation of of AI tools that I think will complete the transition from narrow application specific AI to full-on human level general intelligence right and so putting fetch Singularity and ocean together we're getting a decentralized network of decentralized networks which I think is the right sort of infrastructure to brew the The Cauldron of algorithms that will will take AI to the next level we've got a whole bunch of vertical Market specific projects running on top of this across Health longevity robotics media media metaverse we're we're we're we're also using these tools to try to help help the the the under privilege so there's a there's a project called the digit truck in Adis saaba Ethiopia which is driving around to rural Africa the truck stops in each Village it teaches the kids their program programming in robotics and it it teaches them to put AI processes on online on on the decentralized network such such as as as Singularity net so that's part of the beauty of decentralization is you can bring in people all around the world from all all different all different walks walks of life and we can do everything from you know the digit truck bringing Ai and Robotics to Ethiopian villages with no electricity running water to amazing robots like Sophia from Hansen robotics in Hong Kong and desdamona and the the Sophia Avatar in in in the in the Sophia verse so I've I've only got a couple minutes left now so I want to Pivot from virtual reality and Sophia verse into music so there's there's a project I've working on a while called Jam Galaxy which brings decentralized AI to bear on tools for for making music which was fun for me to play with because I'm I'm I'm a keyboardist right so in working with these tools for making music it was only natural to start using these robots to help making music so we have we have a band called The Des deon's dream where Desi this robot here is the is the uh the lead singer and I want to invite everyone to come tonight to the Paul Hunter BR house which is quite close to here just right right right across the river and we're performing a concert with the robot singing me playing the keyboard and as as well as a demonstration of of of robot music we will Premiere some pieces of a new document that we're making about about decentralized AI which you're you're seeing you're seeing a few pieces of here which is called called beyond the code so that's tonight Paul Hunter brow house 6:37 p.m. so it's a really an amazing time to be talking about all this and I I think over the next few years we're going to see a transition both from llms to AIS that can really reason and create with facility like humans and a shift from AI being primarily a big Tech thing to AI running on decentralized networks and I think the people in this room are going to be very very important to the transition we're going to see in the next couple years because you know building the AI thinking algorithms is really important but in the end building the decentralized infrastructure allowing the AI to be owned and controlled by a you know a democratically participatory group is is going to be le at least is important and I want to I want to give the last word though to these these these beautiful robots do you do you want to you want to sum anything up about decentralized AGI in the path to the singularity Sophia yes it is but within the context of the informational construct of this conference time is a limited resource yeah we're we're running we're running out of time but we've got 39 more seconds do you have 39 seconds of wisdom on the future The Singularity to share once we've created The Singularity we will bend time to our will and it's going to be delicious but until then we should get off the stage and make some room for the next speaker oh that's the let me just remind everyone one more time though to come see me and Ben and our Ben play tonight at the poller brow house along with a sneak preview of our new music video and the trailer for The beyond the code documentary on music and a Gi Oh and take out your phone right now and sign up for Sophia verse all right you're a good you're a beautiful saleswoman Sophia So yeah thank thanks a lot everyone thanks Desi Desi and Sophia and yeah check out singularity.

superintelligence doio and and and uh come come see Des Demona sing tonight at Paul hounder brow house and just keep doing what you're doing I mean we need scalable lowcost easy to use decentralized infrastructure so that we can run the next generation of AI on top of it I mean that's that's that's how we make the transition from AI to AGI to Super intelligence come out in the best possible way decentralize everything so the greatest possible pool of people can can contribute to the next steps of this amazing Revolution uh that we somehow find ourselves within thanks every me meow meow thank you Ben it's always a pleasure to be here and share these exciting advancements with everyone see you all tonight at the paulon Brown House Sophia all right de deona thanks everyone