Meet DAIA’s Founders: SingularityNET & Toda.Network
The Decentralized AI Alliance was founded with the vision to create an ecosystem of ecosystems that advances decentralized AI faster and more effectively than a single organization could hope to do on its own. Believing in co-creation rather than competition , DAIA plans to ensure that the future of AI is beneficial and disruptive for the greater good of humankind and all living beings.
These building blocks were first envisioned by Ben Goertzel and Simone Giacomelli from SingularityNet together with Toufi Saliba from Toda Network, which our team interviewed to learn from them directly.
SingularityNET
Born from a collective will to distribute the power of AI through the Blockchain, SingularityNET lets anyone create, share, and monetize AI services at scale, but also allows these algorithms to interact, hence making them much more useful as a whole.
Sophia, the world’s most expressive robot, is one of the first use cases of the platform. Her mind uses multiple AI modules to see, hear, or respond empathetically, and many of these underlying AI modules will be available open-source on SingularityNET.
From Biomedical Data to Social Network Analysis, the services on this decentralized AI marketplace are either developed by SingularityNET’s AI researching team, crowd-sourced by community members, or developed by companies looking to sell their algorithms.
The non-profit foundation is positioned to disrupt the current AI landscape and possibly serve as the building blocks for an inevitable Artificial General Intelligence future.
Ben Goertzel, CEO and Chief Scientist at SingularityNET, talks about the creation of DAIA:
“In early 2018, Touffi Saliba, my SingularityNET co-founder Simone Giacomelli, and I, founded a new industry organization called the DAIA, the Decentralized AI Alliance, with a goal of pulling together the various projects building systems at the intersection of AI and blockchain, so as to pursue shared goals in a collaborative way.
DAIA will articulate and maintain standards for interaction between different decentralized AI networks, assist decentralized AI projects with media, fundraising, legal issues, foster collaborative software design and development work on tools that are useful for multiple decentralized AI projects. Among the directions under consideration as shared software projects are an AI-based reputation and rating system for participants in decentralized networks, formal logic based systems for automatically checking the correctness of smart contracts, and machine learning based cybersecurity tools.”
He doesn’t stop here and also comments about the future of such an important alliance:
“If DAIA succeeds in its mission, then various decentralized AI networks will be able to operate, from the end-user point of view, almost as if they were one network. An AI agent operating within SingularityNET would be able to outsource work to AI agents operating within a number of other decentralized AI platforms, and a rating of the quality of an agent within one platform would propagate so as to influence the rating of the creator of that agent in other platforms (where they may have created other agents). The model of “normal” network behavior used to help identify anomalous network phenomena from a cybersecurity perspective would be built from data across multiple decentralized networks, so that harmless phenomena seen in one network would not be judged anomalous the first time they are seen in another.
In this vision the decentralized AI ecosystem would be a network of networks — a decentralized network of interoperating decentralized-AI networks, where DAIA as an organization mediates the interoperation of the networks. To the extent that some of the individual AI agents in these networks are also, internally networks — e.g. neural networks, or OpenCog cognitive hypergraphs — then we have a network of networks of networks.
This is complicated but such kind of complications are hardly unknown in either the IT world or the biology world.
The Internet itself is by definition a network of networks — that’s the “inter” — and if one has local area networks participating in the Internet, one has a network of networks of networks.
Human society is a network of people, whose bodies are networks of organs, which organs are networks of cells, which are networks of molecules, which are networks of atoms.”
Toda.Network
Combining proven innovations in networks, cryptography, and consensus, the TODA Protocol achieves a frictionless decentralized transaction layer. Its stateless architecture allows the full protocol to run on low powered mobile devices and provides global finality in 60 seconds for transfers of digital assets.
Toda.Network entered into dozens of joint ventures and strategic technology alliances with businesses wishing to enable their development in a complete decentralized setting and promises to add value to a multitude of industries, from finance to fashion, space, healthcare, education, IoT and anything else that involves transactions of digital assets and information.
Toufi Saliba is the CEO of Toda.Network, here are his words regarding the importance of DAIA:
“Decentralized governance is a security model to prevent an attack or exploitation from within. While centralized systems can continue to provide services to people, preventing the dependency on those systems can reduce and possibly eliminate their ability to exploit the system to their own benefit. Even if their incentives are aligned with the users at the beginning, no guarantees that it would stay that way. Decentralized governance can ensure that by design the overall system’s governance is user-centric. This may seem as a nice to have feature, but fast forward into the future, generations to come would benefit from systems that are secure by design and enjoy services without worrying about an evolution of governance that could use the power of those systems and transform them into methods of control. Subsequently, this can put people’s safety, liberty, and prosperity at risk. This will become number one priority for everyone when they see what we see, unfortunately, if folks wait for the problems to occur then attempt to fix it, it might be too late. In fact, knowing the power of what’s being built, it won’t simply be a possibility but it “will” definitely be too late.
The power of our species is at a collaborative level and not so much individual, yet the effective collaboration is accomplished via technology to connect people. We must secure that technology in advance. There will be no turning back if we don’t. The interesting part here that not a lot of people in power today are paying attention to, is that the more they push for centralization, thinking that they can be more and more in control and therefore secure, “they” will not be the ones in control and if they believe those methods are okay applied to others but not on themselves because they are in control of others, by the time the control is fully accomplished “they” would be the ones in that cage, their children and the next generations they thought they cared about.“
Such advancements in decentralized governmental systems will happen quicker if there is open source collaboration from the community. When asked about how he thinks others can contribute to DAIA, he encourages developers to do this by asking :
“Every single developer/researcher in AI, cryptography(cybersecurity), algorithm, data structure, game theory and crypto-economic must not remain “constrained researcher” in fact, looking historically for example, free researchers built us nuclear energy, constrained researchers gave us, nuclear weapons, do you recall Hiroshima?”
Regarding the trends he sees in AI and the decentralized world, he is rather blunt:
“The most scary trends are how AI is intended to be a method of control, in the name of ‘security’ at the expense of ‘liberty’ and ‘prosperity’ folks should be freed and not constrained.”
For him, blockchain should provide the needed transparency to avoid such results in AI, being essential for a truly democratized and free society, allowing humanity to take full advantage of such technology and not be controlled.
How can you get involved?
Our vision is to foster a world where AI technologies and associated data are made open with decentralized, democratic control for the benefit of all sentient beings.
The immense potential of AI means that it can either increase the inequalities of our societies or liberate us from numerous sufferings. We believe the best way forward is to come together and work towards creating a better future. We see massive potential for evolution in the established centralized corporations. We believe tech giants can contribute immensely toward making the vision of DAIA a reality.
We are welcoming the participation of those corporations that are sincere in their vision of democratizing AI. Together with its founders and partners, DAIA is enabling the layer for such a democratization process.
To learn more about us and inquire about memberships, please contact us at team@daia.foundation.
