SingularityNET is a decentralised AI marketplace which has the ultimate goal of forming the basis for the emergence of the world’s first true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

One of the brightest and most respected minds in AI leads the SingularityNET project, Dr Ben Goertzel.

“Current speed and cost issues with the Ethereum blockchain have increased the urgency of exploring alternatives for SingluarityNET’s blockchain underpinning,” says Goertzel.

“The ambitious Ethereum 2.0 design holds promise but the timing of rollout of different aspects of this next-generation Ethereum remains unclear, along with many of the practical particulars.“

SingularityNET claims that Cardano has now reached a level of maturity which makes it possible to port such a complex project to the new blockchain.

Back in August, Goertzel gave a talk at the Cardano Summit on why functional programming – enabled by Cardano’s Haskell and new Plutus languages – is invaluable for blockchain-based AI:

Current AIs in the SingularityNET marketplace are designed for specific, relatively straightforward tasks like image/language processing, time series analysis, and genomics data analysis. The project’s Android SDK has been used for tasks like separating vocals from music in the SongSplitter app.

While useful, these AIs show the current limitations of the technology today. SingularityNET, true to its name, has far more ambitious plans.

The broader vision of SingularityNET is to decentralise AI away from “big tech” and prevent AIs from being siloed so that one AI can outsource work to others and use their specific expertise to solve problems. This will ultimately bring us a step closer to AGI which acts more like a human by seeking help where needed.

In a blog post, SingularityNET provides further technical details about its decision to switch to Cardano:

“There may also be synergies between SingularityNET-Cardano integration and the OpenCog Hyperon initiative, which is focused on creating a more scalable, flexible and usable successor to the current OpenCog AGI R&D platform (which underlies a handful of specialized AI agents currently running on the SingularityNET network).

The OpenCog AGI design involves a metagraph knowledge store called the Atomspace, concurrently and cooperatively acted on by a number of different cognitive processes representing different learning and reasoning methods such as probabilistic logic, evolutionary learning, pattern mining and neural pattern recognition. Currently, to integrate OpenCog into SingularityNET, one creates a SingularityNET agent wrapping a whole OpenCog system with its own internal Atomspace and AI-process population.

However, in a SingularityNET-on-Cardano approach, it may eventually be possible to take a more decentralized approach in which the Hyperon Atomspace is provided as a service to any SingularityNET agent who needs it, and many of the cognitive processes involved in the Hyperon design are represented as SingularityNET agents that interact with Atomspace via channels set up via SingularityNET protocols. Such an approach would exploit the deep commonalities between the new version of OpenCog’s Atomese language being created for Hyperon and the dependent type based API of APIs under current exploration. The result would be a more fundamentally decentralized approach to AGI design.”

A fascinating interview between Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and Dr Goertzel can be viewed here:

Cardano vs Ethereum

Ethereum is currently the world’s largest decentralised platform but suffers from slow speeds and increasing transaction costs. A switch to a more efficient and environmentally-friendly Proof-of-Stake consensus is underway which – along with new scaling innovations – should address Ethereum’s issues. However, it’s expected to be several years before Ethereum 2.0 is fully rolled out.

Cardano has observed Ethereum’s problems and is taking its time to address them with a scientific and peer-reviewed approach; which brings legitimacy to the project that will be needed for enterprise adoption.

While it could appear from the outside like Cardano has been lazy and is far behind other projects – after all, it’s yet to even support smart contracts – this is far from the case. Cardano is often ranked top of all blockchain projects for development activity and has continued signing large partnerships.

“Cardano has gone from strength to strength this year, and having the backing of such a prominent organisation only reaffirms this,” comments Hoskinson. 

“SingularityNET is a project we’ve followed for a long time, and we’re excited to see how the Cardano blockchain can help SingularityNET realise its ambitious goals.”   

Smart contracts are due to launch on Cardano in the coming months as part of what it calls its ‘Goguen’ phase. Unlike Ethereum, Cardano is using Proof-of-Stake from the start and won’t have the speed, cost, and scalability problems of the current decentralised platform leader.

Cardano will even become the most decentralised network in the space following the recent successful launch of its ‘Shelley’ upgrade.

On its website, Cardano explains:

“We expect Cardano to be 50-100 times more decentralized than other large blockchain networks, with the incentives scheme designed to reach equilibrium around 1,000 stake pools.

Current prominent blockchain networks are often controlled by less than 10 mining pools, exposing them to serious risk of compromise by malicious behavior – something which Cardano avoids with a system inherently designed to encourage greater decentralization.”

We’re already seeing groundbreaking projects like SingularityNET beginning to shift over to Cardano. While it may appear that Cardano has a long way to catch up with Ethereum, it’s worth remembering that – of Ethereum’s close to 3,000 apps – only a minority carry significant value or have many active users.

There is currently around $11 billion “locked up” in Ethereum’s much-vaunted DeFi projects. That’s nothing to be sniffed at, but it only takes some big projects to move to Cardano to put a big dent in Ethereum’s primary use case. It’s also worth remembering the whole space is very young with plenty of growth potential—the global legacy financial system is worth hundreds of trillions of dollars.

While multiple blockchain projects will likely co-exist, Cardano’s ability to “flip” Ethereum is looking more possible than ever.

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GPT-3 has made plenty of headlines in recent months. The coverage is warranted, GPT-3 is certainly impressive—but many of the claims of its current capabilities are greatly exaggerated.

The headline of the article which Duursma questions is: “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?”

It’s a headline that’s bound to generate some clicks. However, often a headline is as far as the reader gets:

What bothers me most about the article is that the newspaper intentionally seems to forget that many people are sloppy, hurried, lazy readers. They read the headline of the article, the article itself and not the italics.

— Jarno Duursma (@JarnoDuursma) September 9, 2020

So there will be people who’ve read the headline and now believe there are powerful “robots” writing entire articles—a false and dangerous narrative in a world with an already growing distrust in the media.

GPT-3 requires human input and must first be supplied with text prompts. To offer a simplified explanation, Duursma calls it “essentially a super-advanced auto-complete system.”

There’s another group of readers; those which skim-read perhaps the first half of an article to get the gist. It’s understandable, life is hectic. However, that means us writers need to ensure any vital information is near the top and not somewhat hidden:

The explanation of the role of human journalists in the creation of this article is subtly hidden in the last lines of a italicized text at the bottom of the page. Of course, almost nobody reads that. Judging from the reactions on twitter, I think I'm right.

— Jarno Duursma (@JarnoDuursma) September 9, 2020

AI technologies will remain assistive to humans for the foreseeable future. While AIs can help with things like gathering research and completing tasks, it all still requires human prompts.

In the case of The Guardian’s article, a human first wrote 50 words. GPT-3 then created eight drafts from the contributed text. A human then went through each of the eight drafts and picked the best parts. Finally, a human went on to edit the text to make it coherent before publishing it.

That’s a lot of human intervention for an article which claims to have been entirely written by AI.

Research scientist Janelle Shane has access to GPT-3 and used it to generate 12 essays similar to what The Guardian would have sifted through to help create its AI-assisted article. Most of the generated text isn’t particularly human-like:

Here are 12 generated essays from GPT-3 using The Guardian's prompt, at various temperature settings.

Remember, GPT-3's task is to be as formulaic as possible. I'm amused at how many of them begin by quoting Elon Musk and Bill Gates.https://t.co/zWiZvMJDGJ pic.twitter.com/IJJ4pfSGoi

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) September 9, 2020

Super-intelligent AIs which can do all of these tasks like a human, known as AGIs (Artificial General Intelligences), are likely decades away.

Last year, AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing:

• 45% predict AGI will be achieved before 2060.
• 34% expect after 2060.
• 21% believe the so-called singularity will never occur.

Even if/when AGI is achieved, there’s a growing consensus that all decisions should ultimately be made by a human to ensure accountability. That means a theoretical generated by an AI would still be checked by a human before it’s published.

Articles like the one published by The Guardian create unnecessary fear which hinders innovation. Such articles also raise unrealistic expectations about what today’s AI technologies can achieve.

Both outcomes are unhealthy for an emerging technology which has huge long-term potential benefits but requires some realism about what’s actually possible today and in the near future.

(Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash)

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The supercomputer will deliver eye-watering amounts of power from its 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs (yes, it can probably even run Crysis.)

OpenAI is a non-profit that was founded by one Elon Musk to promote the ethical development of artificial intelligence technologies. Musk, however, departed OpenAI following disagreements over the company’s direction.

Back in February, Musk responded to an MIT Technology Review profile of OpenAI saying that it “should be more open,” and that all organisations “developing advanced AI should be regulated, including Tesla.”

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI last year and it seems we’re just beginning to see the fruits of that relationship. While most AIs today focus on doing single tasks well, the next wave of research is focusing on performing multiple at once.

“The exciting thing about these models is the breadth of things they’re going to enable,” said Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Kevin Scott.

“This is about being able to do a hundred exciting things in natural language processing at once and a hundred exciting things in computer vision, and when you start to see combinations of these perceptual domains, you’re going to have new applications that are hard to even imagine right now.”

So-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the ultimate goal for AI research; the point when a machine can understand or learn any task just like the human brain.

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” said Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI. “Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI.”

“We believe it’s crucial that AGI is deployed safely and securely and that its economic benefits are widely distributed. We are excited about how deeply Microsoft shares this vision.”

AGI will, of course, require tremendous amounts of processing power.

Microsoft and OpenAI claim their new supercomputer would rank in the top five but do not give any specific power measurements. To rank in the top five, a supercomputer would currently require more than 23,000 teraflops of performance. The current leader, the IBM Summit, reaches over 148,000 teraflops.

“As we’ve learned more and more about what we need and the different limits of all the components that make up a supercomputer, we were really able to say, ‘If we could design our dream system, what would it look like?’” said Altman. “And then Microsoft was able to build it.”

Unfortunately, for now at least, the supercomputer is built exclusively for OpenAI.

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Carmack made his name in the video game industry after being responsible for groundbreaking titles such as Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake. He took up the role of CTO at Oculus to help bring about the next big thing in gaming, VR.

While not entirely stepping down from Oculus, Carmack is transitioning into a “Consulting CTO” role. This role, he says, will enable him to continue helping to shape VR while only taking up “a modest slice of my time.”

So, is Carmack using his free time to sip pina coladas on a beach somewhere? No, he’s diving headfirst into the world of AI.

Carmack says his previous efforts in life have all been somewhat related and given him a “line of sight” to solutions. Aside from a renowned game developer, Carmack is literally a rocket scientist who’s worked in aerospace engineering.

“I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight,” says Carmack. “I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.”

Carmack believes AI offers him the challenge he seeks. He describes the field as “enormously valuable” and one he believes he has a chance of making a difference in.

The choice for Carmack came down to working on AI or cost-effective nuclear fission reactors from his home office in a “Victorian Gentleman Scientist” style. The latter, he jokes, he passed on because it “wouldn’t have been as suitable for that style of work.”

Carmack is specifically working on achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which is the ultimate goal of the industry. While today’s AIs are typically programmed for a specific task, AGIs will learn much in the way humans do.

Yes, Carmack is basically working on Skynet. We can only hope it leads to robots more like R2-D2 than a T-1000.

(Image Credit: Photo by Drew “Prognar” Campbell under CC BY 2.0 license)

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The partners are specifically looking at artificial general intelligence (AGI) technologies which aim to replicate the complex tasks of which humans are capable.

AGI is considered a step above standard AI because it aims to add human-like reasoning capabilities in uncertain scenarios. Such processing will enable AGIs to do things like solve puzzles and make plans which are beyond that of today’s AIs.

Dr Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET, said:

“The scale of the AGI deployments needed by a partner like Cisco is going to be tremendous, and we are working hard to make sure our AGI tools and our blockchain-based platform is up to the task.”

Such a large tech conglomerate as Cisco joining up with SingularityNET adds a lot of credibility to the project’s goals.

SingularityNET describes itself as the first decentralised AI network that lets anyone create, share, and monetise AI services at scale. The idea behind the decentralisation is that it prevents any single player from hoarding AI capabilities and instead for it to be distributed globally.

“To really build a global decentralized thinking machine we are going to need to put a lot of complicated ingredients together, and the collaboration between Cisco and SingularityNET has the potential to accelerate things tremendously,” Goertzel said.

In May, the Singapore and Malaysia division of Domino’s Pizza announced that it was partnering with SingularityNET to apply blockchain-powered AI to its supply chain processes.

“In 10 years, you’re going to see AGIs with IQs higher than humans,” Goertzel believes.

A beta of SingularityNET’s AI Marketplace can be found here which features 40 (as of writing) artificial intelligence-powered services.

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If you’ve spent your life binging on sci-fi flicks and shows, today’s AI is far from the likes of HAL and Jarvis. For those kinds of experiences, AGI is needed.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said:

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI.

We believe it’s crucial that AGI is deployed safely and securely and that its economic benefits are widely distributed. We are excited about how deeply Microsoft shares this vision.”

Whereas AI is essentially pre-programmed to perform set tasks, the promise of AGI is to act more like a human brain. Indeed, this is where the excitement of assistants like the aforementioned turn into concerns of a Skynet-like AI as portrayed in Terminator.

Elon Musk founded OpenAI in part due to his concerns that AGI could pose an existential risk if developed carelessly. OpenAI most recently made headlines for developing essentially a fake news generator that, for obvious reasons, it deemed too dangerous to release.

Musk departed OpenAI in February last year over disagreement’s with the company’s development, but the San Francisco-based firm continues to pursue AGI.

Microsoft is clearly on-board with OpenAI’s mission. The $1 billion investment ensures Microsoft becomes OpenAI’s exclusive provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI, and the pair will build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, commented:

“AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time and has the potential to help solve many of our world’s most pressing challenges.

By bringing together OpenAI’s breakthrough technology with new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, our ambition is to democratise AI — while always keeping AI safety front and centre — so everyone can benefit.”

Both companies promise developments will adhere to their ‘shared principles on ethics and trust,’ and will ‘create the foundation for advancements in AI to be implemented in a safe, secure, and trustworthy way’.

The goal of Microsoft and OpenAI is a lofty one that may not even be achieved in many of our lifetimes. In a recent survey of some leading experts in the field, the average estimate was there is a 50 percent chance AGI will be developed by 2099.

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