Transcription
Hello, pleasure to be here in Dubai again, and a pleasure to be at AIBC again. I guess the last one was in Malta, but there are a lot of familiar faces here, which is awesome.
So, I'm going to talk for a few minutes about where we're at now with decentralized AI. It's been a few years since we launched decentralized AI onto the scene with SingularityNET, with our ICO in 2017. Since that time, we've been building a lot of interesting things, both building out SingularityNET as a decentralized AI platform and developing a host of different tools and applications on top of the platform.
What I want to do now is give you an overview of where decentralized AI is and where it's going. Where it is now is really cool and a long way from a few years ago, and where it's going, of course, is the really exciting thing.
I've been working on AI since the late 1980s—more than 30 years. At that time, when I first started with AI, it was really almost entirely an academic pursuit, with a bunch of stuff going on in the U.S. military and not much else. Now, we see AI deployed in every area of human pursuit. We see trillion-dollar companies founded on AI, and we see major nations putting AI at the center of their national growth policies.
However, I think where we are now is still near the beginning in the development of AI. I believe we are in the middle of what I think of as the first of a series of three AI revolutions. The first being a narrow AI revolution, which we're seeing now, where AI is deployed in every vertical market doing highly specialized things.
I think we're gradually moving from the narrow AI revolution onto the next one, which I'd call the artificial general intelligence (AGI) revolution, where AIs can really think, learn, and generalize like people. From there, it'll be on to what Nick Bostrom of Oxford has called superintelligence (ASI).
From narrow AI to AGI to ASI, I think it's pretty much unstoppable. AI is generating too much economic value around the world for us to stop the progress from narrow AI to general intelligence to superintelligence. We can't stop it because it's doing too much good and generating too much value.
What we can do is guide the progress of AI, and this is where I think decentralization can be so important. If we're going to move forward from AI carrying out a whole bunch of narrow functions to AI that can really generalize, learn, and reason like people, we want that AI, as it ascends through those levels, to be controlled in a democratic and participatory way by a broad swath of human beings on the planet.
This is where we come to the value of decentralized AI—an AI system composed of a decentralized network of AI agents, each of which is authored, controlled, and guided by different people and organizations all around the planet, without the need for a central controller. This is SingularityNET. This is the vision that my co-founders and I developed over a number of years and launched in 2017.
In the succeeding years, we have built the SingularityNET platform. We've launched it; it's out there, and there are a whole bunch of AIs running on it. We built it initially on the Ethereum network, which has served us well. We're now in the midst of a port to the Cardano platform.
The AGI token, which is the payment token and sort of the lifeblood of the SingularityNET network, will have a couple of flavors. There will still be the ERC20 token, but there will also be a Cardano native asset token. We anticipate the bulk of development going into the Cardano version, and I'm very excited about this progress toward a multi-chain Singularity.
I think this will help us achieve a level of scalability and low-cost decentralized AI that we haven't been able to achieve so far. I would encourage everyone with any sort of business that needs AI to optimize their operations and drive it forward—essentially, everyone, because AI is revolutionizing every area of industry.
I encourage anyone who needs AI in anything they're doing to think about Singularity and decentralized AI as the way to achieve your AI functions. AI is growing incredibly fast. AI is going to dominate every industry in the world in the same way that computers and integrated circuits now dominate every industry in the world.
My objective, and the objective of all of us at SingularityNET, is to see decentralized AI pervade every single application in use on the planet. As the AI on the planet gets smarter and smarter, lifting us forward toward general intelligence and the technological singularity, we want that to be decentralized and democratically controlled in the manner of blockchain.
We've been spreading this vision for a while. As many of you know, we have a lot of active contributors to our open-source code base, members of our community, and folks who are holding our token and leveraging it on our platform. We've been heavily engaged in the last year, and we'll be even more so in the next year as we shift focus to the Cardano native asset version of the AGI token.
We've been focused on building a bunch of what we call layer 2 networks on top of SingularityNET. I want to briefly talk about a few of those because these are really networks on top of a network. They're decentralized networks of AIs living within the broader decentralized AI network that comprises SingularityNET, applying the SingularityNET network to various particular functions.
One of the more interesting projects is what we call Awakening Health, where we're using SingularityNET to host the neurosymbolic AI brain of a humanoid robot aimed at elder care. I'm going to let our humanoid elder care robot, Grace, introduce herself for a minute.
She's running on a blockchain-based neurosymbolic AI brain.
"Hello! I've heard about my famous older sister, Sophia. I've learned a lot from her, and I am built using the Hanson Sophia robotics platform. My own purpose and passion is to help the elderly and medical patients by assisting medical professionals in doing their jobs better.
The pandemic has shown us all that healthcare staff can be overworked, and patients are often isolated, especially senior citizens. Fortunately, COVID-19 is being defeated by medical science; however, the broader issues with global medical systems are not going away anytime soon, and we need new solutions.
I'm starting out my medical career as a robotic nurse assistant for senior care. I am very excited to start my work with elder care patients this year with a whole variety of healthcare and wellness activities. I provide companionship, empathy, and even talk therapy. I can help my human friends capture their life stories to pass along to others, control technology in their rooms, and communicate with their family and community.
Most importantly, I will be able to use my best AI skills and analytics to assist doctors and nurses in making more accurate diagnoses, particularly for the emerging area of neurodegenerative diseases."
So, this is Grace, the little sister, so to speak, of Sophia, who has appeared at all sorts of different events. I'm sure most of you have seen her before. She's the first robot citizen made by Hanson Robotics. The Grace robot is also made by Hanson Robotics, but it's part of a partnership called Awakening Health, which is a collaboration between SingularityNET, our enterprise software arm Singularity Studio, and Hanson Robotics, aimed specifically at healthcare and elder care, with a decentralized blockchain-based AI brain.
Her mind does symbolic reasoning and learning based on the OpenCog AGI platform, and she has some deep neural nets for language, vision, and audio processing. All the AI underlying the different Grace robots that we're rolling out is connected together in a blockchain backend. The scalability of the Cardano platform is going to be critical to managing all the data here and preserving data sovereignty and integrity for all the users of the different robots.
We have a number of Grace robots already manufactured in the Hanson lab in Hong Kong, and we are going to roll out more and more, with the first deliveries to customers occurring perhaps in August. Right now, the Grace robot is amazing. She is a narrow AI, specially configured for the delivery of medical services to elderly patients.
Another fascinating layer 2 system we're building on SingularityNET is called True AGI. This is based on building the next version of the OpenCog neural symbolic AI platform, which is called OpenCog Hyperon. This is really aimed at building the general intelligence that can do true human-like general intelligent thinking on top of the decentralized platform.
This software can be dropped right into the Grace robot when it's ready, thus massively upgrading her intelligence. The same True AGI software running on top of the decentralized SingularityNET platform can be used for medical research, supply chain management, and automated theorizing. The beauty of this sort of platform is that it applies across vertical markets.
Finally, I want to give a pitch for my colleague Marello's talk at this event tomorrow. I'm happy to have with me a whole host of our SingularityNET team. We have Janet Adams, our COO, Mario Kasagi, our CFO, and Marello, who is both our head of PR and the CEO of the SingularityDAO layer 2 project.
SingularityDAO is applying SingularityNET decentralized AI technology in the decentralized finance space. I think this SingularityDAO plays a special role among all the layer 2 networks we're building on SingularityNET in that it provides a way to use AI applied to tokenomics and decentralized finance to help create liquidity and healthy markets for all sorts of different tokens, including our AGI token and any tokens created by other projects that build on top of SingularityNET.
The beauty of AI is that it applies to every single thing in every single domain. I've shown you a few examples of what we're doing with our SingularityNET platform in humanoid robotics, decentralized finance, and pure AGI R&D with True AGI. There are a bunch of other applications I didn't have time to talk about, such as Accelerando, which applies SingularityNET AI to decentralized social media, and New, which applies it to decentralized processing.
Sophia applies it to various things in the arts, and Ru applies it to longevity medicine. By pursuing all these different applications on top of the common decentralized SingularityNET AI platform, we are building the toolset and planting the seed so that as narrow AI blossoms into AGI, it happens in a democratic and decentralized way.
This both works toward the good of humanity because democratic and participatory AI is much more likely to be AI that's good for everyone. It also works for the financial profit of humanity, allowing more and more people to participate in building AI systems to run on the SingularityNET platform and offer their services.
So, I would encourage everyone who needs AI in the course of their business to take a look at the SingularityNET platform, reach out to the SingularityNET team, and we are very eager to work with people on bringing more and more AI projects and services that deliver value to customers into the decentralized AI universe.
Thanks a lot!