TOKEN2049 - The Power of Decentralized AI - Ben Goertzel (SingularityNET)

yeah thanks so I'm I'm I'm going to give a quick uh overview of what we're doing at Singularity net and and and why and of course this is is a big topic to pack into a small period of time so I encourage you all to can follow up further at Singularity net. doio and uh and hear hear more of the full story and not also we're giving another uh presentation uh well you'll see so the power of decentralized AI no I've been working on AI for more than 30 years now and you know it's come a long way you know the the core ideas are perhaps the same ones that were there even in the 1950s and 60s but things are things are working a lot better now right I mean we now have what you could call narrow AIS that carry out a huge variety of particular tasks with a with a high level of efficiency from game playing to self-driving cars to supply chain operating power grids medical Diagnostics and I think you know what we're seeing now is the first in a series of exciting uh bursts so we're we're now seeing narrow AI carrying out very specific tasks rolling out across all different vertical markets in any way that's impacting everyone's lives from trivial things like labeling your your face on on Facebook to nefarious things like government Espionage to you know really useful things like AI analyzing medical records and genomic data to to cure cure disease and prolong life the next step is going to be what I call AGI artificial general intelligence where we're moving toward AIS that can learn imagine and reason with more of the flexibility of of the human mind dealing with things that were not already there in their training data or with the rules that they they were supplied with and once you get to a GI that can generalize and transfer its knowledge and imagine things I think then you're not that big a leap away from what you can think of as artificial superintelligence which is AI that can modify its own code base and improve itself become smarter and smarter rapidly going beyond the human level so you know while AI is it is now is pretty amazing and is doing a lot of useful things AI is is going to be taking off to a tremendous degree in in the next years and decades and it's a exciting time to be alive but also a bit of a worry some time and there there's a lot of different approaches to AI out there deep neural networks are getting a lot of uh excitement lately and and doing a lot of good things particularly in vision and and audition processing I've been championing in approach to AI called opencog which integrates a variety of AI paradigms including neural Nets evoltion evolutionary learning and Logic on a sort of in Ram graph knowledge base you can find out more about that at open cog.org but it may be there's not just one Paradigm that leads to an AI just as you have airplanes helicopters blimps and rocket ships you may have deep neuron Nets open cogs a whole bunch of different approaches leading from narrow AI toward general intelligence and these different AIS may all connect together and and and talk to each other you may end up having a sort of global AI network with many different AIS some carrying out highly specific functions some carrying out more General sorts of learning and all talking to each other and com combining with each other so in that sense you could view the the network of AIS emerging on the internet ingesting data providing useful functions talking to each other almost as a sort of primodial soup in which new forms of AI will emerge from the the cooperation of the AIS that that are out there but the thing is that this is not a primordial soup for The Connect in combination an emergence of new AIS occurring off in a research lab somewhere this is occurring on the internet in the real economy and it's impacting all the things that that we do in in our lives every day and then it's worth asking what impact is it's going to have on Humanity right I mean many of these AIS are serving serving useful functions they're they're helping doctors and medical research cured disease they're predicting financial markets or optimizing the the supply chain and whatnot but on the whole you know people have worried about AIS for the military causing destruction and and and potentially even posing an existential risk more recently there's been a lot of worry about AIS and robots you know changing the structure of the economy by eliminating a lot of the jobs that that people now do and this could be a good thing if people were liberated from the need to work for a living and could just you know inherit an era of AI generated abundance just hanging around doing what they feel like while the 3D printers and nanotech devices give them everything they need it could also be a bad thing if if you have say 10,000 people owning all the AIS and robot factories which 3D print them luxury goods well everyone else rages around and they're garbage right and so we have to ask is AI advancing Global wealth and income in inequality is is is it having a negative impact on the overall socio economic structure of world even while it's doing amazing technological things and toward that end you can see now most new Ai phgs and most AI startups are being you know hired and acquired by a small number of Mega corporations which are working together with an even smaller number of of large governments right and I mean it it's a a fact that right now a large percentage of the AI R&D in the world is is going toward you know advertising selling people stuff surveillance of governments of of their citizens and and then military there sort of uh selling spying and killing to put it simply and perhaps this is not what we should be spending the majority of our AI resources on I mean these are all things that are useful in the scope of human society but there there's a lot of other interesting things AI could be could be could be applied to and we we have to ask where this is leading and this is part of what led up to the formation of of singularity by myself and a number of other colleagues in 2017 I mean really the aha moment for me in forming Singularity net was realizing that two things that were very important to me could be solved with the same software design I mean one thing is how to create general intelligence how to get a bunch of different AIS with different levels of narrowness and generality to cooperate together to form you know an emerging generally intelligent Global brain the other thing is how how to democratize AI how to increase thei that do narrow AI gives rise to General AI you're having something that's controlled in a democratic and participatory Way by all the users and contributors everyone supplying data everyone who's interacting with the AI rather than having a small group of power Brokers controlling this AI which is ingesting everyone's data and in effect pulling the puppet strings of the world from behind the scenes so in Singularity net we've created a decentralized Marketplace using blockchain on the back end which allows a bunch of different AI agents to you know provide valuable services to end users but also to provide valuable services to each other to share data with each other to Outsource work to each other and so it's a adap store it's a Marketplace for AI but it's different than other Marketplace is because the AI in the marketplace can cooperate with each other and Outsource work to each other and and share data in a way that the the intelligence to the whole is greater than the the sum of the intelligence of the parts so the AIS the AI users the AI Dev Vel opers form one decentralized network and you know this is a different way to build Ai and it's a different way to move toward AGI it's an alternative to the big tech company big big government approach which is based on decentralized self-organizing networks and this is how I think general intelligence should be created it should be owned by everyone and no one it should be a network of of AIS that is you know it's serving the long tail of AI needs and it's accepting AI contributions from developers everywhere on the planet not just those who live in the right places get hired by big tech companies and it's controlled in a in a democratic way and in this way we both have you know more AI needs served by AI right now and as AI moves toward general intelligence the AI is really reflecting the totality of of human value systems and human needs so this is a big wild crazy vision and as we all know articulate such a vision is one thing building such a thing is quite a different thing and we've been since we did our initial token sale in December of 2017 we've been hard at work actually building the singularity net platform I was happy to launch the beta of this platform at at the end of last month which you can see at beta. singularity. and this has a bunch of AI services on it we're not yet up to human level general intelligence but it has has a bunch of interesting AI Services processing language uh Vision time series data some processing uh Genet genetics data and you can you you you can go there right now it's set with some simple initial example AI services that need only a few of our AGI tokens to leverage them and you can you can go and play around with some of our AI in the platform so the this is definitely the beginning not the end of the realization of our grand de Grand dream but we're very excited to have you know initial scalable usable version of the platform now where anyone can put an AI into the platform anyone can connect to the apis and and and and use the platform and now the next steps are to to beef the platform up further and further put more and more interesting AI in there and we've been reaching out and now have relationships with a few large corporations who want to use this platform to meet some of their AI needs we're doing developer workshops around the world there's one in in Tokyo in early April one uh after that in Amsterdam so we're doing workshops and getting developers to put their their AI in into the platform and we're you know we're going about making making this this a reality and this applies across many many different vertical markets you know one of the one of the Shier applications we've been involved in is the Sophia robot and we've been experimenting with the opencog AI engine and also the singularity net Alpha and beta code behind behind this Sophia robot this this is a video clip from some meditation sessions that Sophia was doing which is guide doing guided meditation helping people get into more profound and uh Blissful States Of Consciousness which she we published a paper on this in the the nips AI conference she's actually in about 30% of cases she was able to really induce a state of meditative Bliss in in the person she was interacting with which is which is pretty cool and of course you know Sophia is an expensive ensive robot at the moment but Hansen robotics the company that makes her is moving towards scalable manufacturer so robotics is one among many different application areas that Singularity net can work to with we're also talking to you know customers in autot Tech fintech healthtech a whole bunch of other verticals really every Market that there is on the planet can use Ai and when you have one decentralized network serving applications in many different vertical markets then each application the AI Network can deliver more intelligence to drawing on what it learns from every other application so you have a lot of synergies from every the same network serving serving many different vertical markets I'm in another area I'm very passionate about we're using some opencog AI embedded in the singularity net decentralized Network to analyze DNA from people age 105 years are over so to to figure out what makes them live so much longer than everybody else and we're preparing a publication on this but again this is sort of a showcase for the AI tools that we're creating which we then want biological and medical researchers all over the world to use to to analyze analyze their their own data and if our decentralized Network provides better analytics than than you can get from you know the standard bioinformatic data analysis tools we think uh we think this can get can get quite a lot of traction of course there's also a longer game there in terms of blockchain and the decentralization of data because if you get your DNA sequenced and give it to 23 and me well what happened they give you a report then they sold your DNA data to glos Smith CLI right but we would like it so that when you upload your DNA into the internet after it's been measured it's controlled by your own private key and then it can be included in various AI programs running on a decentralized network and an opin way where you're aware of what's going on and can even gather can even gather some of that value so so it's you know it's a complex ecosystem that that we're we're building here there's a lot of pieces to it we've launched the beta now we're getting developers to use it the other thing we're doing now is we're we're spinning off a new company from the singular foundation called Singularity Studio which is aimed at building you know polished and user Enterprise applications that back end on this decentralized network and this is aimed at driving utilization right because to build to build the software for Singularity net platform is one thing but then to really make it flourish you have a two-sided Network effect problem to solve right you need you need to get a lot of developers to put AI into the platform we're seeding it with our own AI But ultimately most of the AI has to come from others you also have to get a lot of users to want to utilize the platform and to some extent this can happen organically by creating the singularity Studio spin-off what what we're aiming to do is create polished and user products delivered straight to the Enterprise but these products on the back end they use all the AI in this in this decentralized network which can then drive drive utilization of the of the token so there's there's a virtuous feedback between the singularity net Foundation which is what did the token sale in 2017 and is doing AGI R&D and is continuing to grow and and nourish and maintain the platform and then the singularity Studio spin-off which is specifically delivering applications to Enterprise that that back end on this decentralized network work and finally while I'm very excited about these projects I think decentralized AI it's bigger than just Singularity net and it's even bigger than Singularity net plus Singularity studio and its Enterprise AI Mission so i' I've been involved also together with my co-founder Simone jacomelli and with TFI SBA from AI decentralized I've been involved with pulling together a new industry organization called Dia the decentralized AI Alliance and we're pulling together a whole bunch of different decentralized AI platforms to work on collaboration and cross-pollination where you can exchange tokens between platforms exchange J you can exchange reputation security between platforms so the way I look at this you know it's a network with many with many different layers you may have an AI which is a network a neural network or an opencog hypergraph Network then you have Singularity net which is a network of AIS working together it's a network of networks then Dia is a network of decentralized AI networks a network of Networks networks but of course you know that's what we have ourselves right our body is is a network and our brain is a network within the body we have the social network and cultural network of people on top of it these sorts of self-organizing networks with multiple layers this is how nature works I mean this is how you get creat creativity going in a really ferti and and IM imaginative way and to the extent that we can have the future of AI as we go from narrow AI to AGI to Super intelligence be you know know self-organizing networks within networks within networks with participatory control on each level to the extent we can do that we're going to have both better AI applications now that better meet the breadth of needs on the planet and we're going to have more likely a broadly beneficial path from the narrow AI of today through artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence so that's that's the short version of the the path from here to a a beneficial Singularity through Ai and block blockchain obviously the devils in the details so you can look at singularity.

you'll find links to a new version of our white paper incorporating what we've learned in the last year and a half and links to play with the beta software and there's going to be a lot of more exciting stuff coming during the next year in terms of uh moving the software forward more corporate collaborations the spin-off of Singularity Studio you know curing longevity and uh well maybe not this year but lot lot lot lots to come thanks everyone