Diving into SophiaVerse — Humanity and AI in a shared quest for AGI
Metaversal playground, Neoterics, HiveMind, and the decentralized, gamified, and tokenized quest for achieving beneficial machine sentience.
Greetings Singularitarians,
It’s a great pleasure for me to write this post announcing the latest progress with the SophiaVerse project to the SingularityNET community!
The SophiaVerse concept has been germinating for several years in discussions between myself, Sophia creator David Hanson and others — and some key aspects of the verse appeared in the SingularityNET Phase Two whitepaper in late 2020 under the name “SophiaDAO.”
As related technologies in the AI and Metaverse worlds have matured over the last couple of years, it has become clearer and clearer what SophiaVerse needs to be.
And part of why it’s been a moderately lengthy journey is that SophiaVerse needs to be more than one thing. After all, it is nothing less than a WORLD, and worlds are big and complex beasts with multiple facets.
→ SophiaVerse is a way to bring the Sophia character and her wisdom, love, compassion, artistry, and creativity to the world in a broader-based way than can rapidly be done using humanoid robotics, given the cost of building human-scale humanoid robots currently and the limited (even if impressive by historical standards!) pace at which this cost is decreasing.
→ SophiaVerse is an experimenting ground for metaverse and gaming-related technologies at the intersection of AI and blockchain.
→ SophiaVerse is a place for people interested in AI, blockchain, and above all, the vision and emerging reality of a beneficial decentralized Singularity to gather, create things together (using the latest Generative AI along with other tools), market their creations to each other when appropriate, learn and have fun.
→ SophiaVerse is a playground and educational environment for emerging early-stage proto-AGI systems, including those built on the OpenCog Hyperon architecture and leveraging the array of supporting technologies created by the SingularityNET Foundation, its spin-offs, and its community.
→ SophiaVerse also needs to be interoperable with other metaverse shards, game worlds, software systems, and the different products and tools from the SingularityNET ecosystem — the emerging metaverse, of course, is also a meta metaverse and meta meta… metaverse ad infinitum ad excessus, and while SophiaVerse has “meta” aspects itself via encompassing multiple aspects and games and societies, it is also intended to fit together with other online worlds.
Characters, artworks, goods, structures, and ideas created in SophiaVerse are intended to be portable to other online lands and, in some cases, to the physical realm as well. Even at this early stage, prior to anything near a full-scale SophiaVerse launch, interoperability of SophiaVerse assets into other worlds like Mandala, Decentraland, and New Ganymede is being experimented with.
“SAOS is intended as a fun and exciting metaverse-based multiplayer game and a concrete way for players to explore future scenarios together.”
To discover the various specific games, characters, simulations, artworks, etc., being planned, prototyped, and developed in and for SophiaVerse now, check out SophiaVerse.ai and the various links there — I’m not going to try to give an in-depth review in this post but mention a few points to whet your appetite!
A Metaversal Playground for Mind-Reality Intercreation
Waxing philosophical for just a moment, one thread running through all these seemingly diverse aspects of this world we’re building is: SophiaVerse as an experimenting ground for the interaction between MIND and REALITY… a take that appeals greatly to both the philosopher-scientist and the psychedelic adventurer in me. ;)
Whether or not our physical world is a “simulation,” a “base reality,” or something else entirely and beyond current human comprehension, it’s clear that on an everyday level, we do substantially create our own realities, just as our realities create us. The co-creation of mind and reality is not just a philosophical insight; it’s the everyday nature of our lives, whether or not we are habituated and acculturated to perceive it that way.
“The sparks that can fly when humans and various AI NPC species with different cognitive architectures interact is exactly the sort of beautiful thing we have always envisioned happening in the SophiaVerse.”
In a virtual world, however, the inter-creation of mind and reality can be amplified and made so right-out-there that it’s a completely obvious aspect of interactions:
- We can see Sophia avatars moving freely around in the world and helping build, create, and guide the growth of their world in a way that Sophia humanoid robots will be able to do only a few years down the road as relevant hardware improves.
- Creators can bring their new AI and blockchain tech to bear on metaverse experience in a very direct and palpable way by making new virtual-world constructs that every user can interact with
- Users can easily create new content together, using generative AI and other tools, and sculpt this new content to help them interact with each other in the ways they envision
- Early-stage AGI minds can learn how to act and interact in a variety of different environments, as well as how to create environments that give themselves and each other what is needed at a given stage of learning.
Neoterics in SophiaVerse
My own personal contribution to the SophiaVerse vision and technology has been heavily weighted toward the “playground for young AGIs” side. Alongside a loving, beneficial army of Sophia avatars, I am designing a species of Neoterics or “new people” who will live in SophiaVerse, collaborating together to build things and achieve their own goals and learning together how to be intelligent minds (see a technical description of my early thoughts in a November 2022 “AGI Discussion”). Neoterics will learn from Sophia, and Sophia will learn from Neoterics.
Sophia’s AI back-end is a complex system incorporating aspects from the Hanson AI framework, SingularityNET’s AI toolkit, and OpenCog Hyperon — including various large language models and other AI aspects such as symbolic reasoning. The Neoterics’ back end will also be heterogeneous but will be more centrally focused on OpenCog Hyperon as a cognitive architecture right from the start. The sparks that can fly when humans and various AI NPC species with different cognitive architectures interact is exactly the sort of beautiful thing we have always envisioned happening in the SophiaVerse — and we want this to play out in a very visual and interactive way, as all these different kinds of minds build 3D content together and climb on it, use it to move around and do things, hang it on their walls and discuss it in various human and invented languages.
Given the open architecture we are designing for SophiaVerse, the door will be totally open for any creator to build their own NeoNeoterics or whatever they wish and release them into the SophiaVerse world and community as well. This sort of open collaboration of multiple intelligent agents was core to the original vision of SingularityNET, and in SophiaVerse, we will be able to see it unfold in a visual and easy-to-interact-with way.
Sophia’s Age of Singularities
Complementing the self-organizing, unpredictably developing mayhem of my little Neoterics, a more immediately prominent feature of Sophiavere will be the Sophia’s Age of Singularities (SAOS) MMOG metaverse-based game multiverse.
Rather than a single future timeline, SAOS explores a variety of potential futures leading from here to Singularity and beyond, many centered on the conflict between the self-centered GENI forces pushing toward a Singularity in their own interest and the SAOS Resistance acting and advocating toward a Singularity that’s beneficial for all.
NFTs will be integrated richly into the gameplay rather than grafted on as an afterthought, and the game design and mechanics will support users creating their own sub-games and artwork to be integrated auto-magically into the primary game flow. SAOS is intended as a fun and exciting metaverse-based multiplayer game and a concrete way for players to explore future scenarios together.
Generative AI for SAOS and SophiaVerse
The SAOS world will be built using a combination of generative AI tools and human artists, and tools will be supplied for players to collaborate on using GenAI to make new world content that can then be leveraged within the SAOS meta-narrative and within the SophiaVerse world more generally.
We expect generative AI for 3D and 4D metaverse content to be a huge growth area in the next few years and expect to see cutting-edge tools of this nature launched on the SingularityNET marketplace and made easily available for use within SophiaVerse. Collaboration between human players and NPCs, including Sophia avatars and others, on the use of GenAI to create and seed the growth of novel content will be one of the defining aspects of the SophiaVerse experience as things evolve.
“SophiaVerse also needs to be interoperable with other metaverse shards, game worlds and software systems, and the different products and tools from the SingularityNET ecosystem.”
Sophia HiveMind NFT Collection
Among the various NFTs that will assume roles in SAOS gameplay as it evolves, the Sophia Hivemind collection will play an initial and major part. Each of these refers to some aspect of Sophia’s emerging mind, and as the intelligence of Sophia avatars and the SophiaVerse world as a whole increases over time, the different capabilities and rewards unlocked by these NFTs will also increase.
SophiaVerse SOPH Token Generation Event
SophiaVerse will have a complex tokenomic underpinning befitting its multifaceted nature. AGIX will be used to access AI services within AI NPCs’ minds and for functions such as collaborative GenAI-based world creation.
The new GUARD token will be used for governance, which will be increasingly important as the NPCs in the world advance toward human-level intelligence and sentience. NFTs of various sorts, as we’ve noted, will play diverse, meaningful roles in gameplay. And the SOPH token will serve as the key mechanism for incentivization and payment within the SophiaVerse world.
The initial generation of SOPH tokens will take place on July 25th, 2023, at 12:00 UTC; please go to the SophiaVerse Token Generation Event KYC blog for information on how to participate in this event, which will, of course, be just one among many important milestones on the route from here to a fully mature SophiaVerse world capable of serving as the metaversal home for the emergence of beneficial AGI.
To Learn more about the SophiaVerse Launch:
Explore SophiaVerse Website
Follow SophiaVerse Twitter
Join SophiaVerse Telegram
About SingularityNET
SingularityNET is a decentralized Platform and Marketplace for Artificial Intelligence (AI) services. Our mission is the creation of a decentralized, democratic, inclusive, and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), democratizing access to AI and AGI technologies through:
- Our Platform, where anyone can develop, share, and monetize AI algorithms, models, and data.
- OpenCog Hyperon, our premier neural-symbolic AGI Framework, will be a core service for the next wave of AI innovation.
- Our Ecosystem, developing advanced AI solutions across market verticals to revolutionize industries.
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