Mindplex Episode 11: HyperCycle — Building A Secure Decentralized Internet of AI

Published in

SingularityNET

6 min readJul 28, 2023

Watch the 11th Mindplex Podcast and livestream Pubcast, featuring Toufi Saliba (CEO) and Dann Toliver (CTO) from HyperCycle.

Greetings Singularitarians, and welcome to your next glimpse of the rapidly approaching future, with Ben Goertzel, Lisa Rein, and Grace Robot, your hosts for The Mindplex Podcast:

The Mindplex Podcast team will host a watch party “Pubcast” live stream of Episode 11 on SingularityNET YouTube on July 28 at 11 AM PST/6 PM UTC.

Mindplex Pubcast Episode 11: On Secure Decentralized AI

Join us this Friday at 11 am PST/6pm UTC — we’ll have Toufi Saliba (HyperCycle’s CEO) and Dann Toliver (HyperCycle’s CTO) joining us for the Live Pubcast, along with co-hosts Ben Goertzel and Lisa Rein.

Mindplex Podcast Episode 11: Building A Secure Decentralized Internet of AI

Watch Episode 11 of the Podcast now:

In Episode 11, Ben Goertzel, who is also HyperCycle’s Chief AI Scientist, explains a bit about HyperCycle’s goals:

“HyperCycle is really a combination of TODA, the ledgerless blockchain, with some other technology ideas that came out of the SingularityNET ecosystem. The overall goal we’ve had in pulling TODA together with these other technologies to form HyperCycle was really, initially, to make a blockchain infrastructure that would enable us to do on-chain AI, at large scale and with low cost and high efficiency. Meaning that we want to sort of scale down the use of blockchain within AI systems. So littler and littler chunks of AI processing can be done on blockchain.
Some of the other ingredients that we’ve pulled into HyperCycle include: proof of reputation, and then the MeTTa smart contract language that’s connected with opencog AI system. It is also quite interesting the way it intersects with things like the transitioning of some crypto mining firms to AI server farms and so forth.”

Another exciting prospect for HyperCycle is the prospect of “emergent behavior” that may come about when multiple AI agents that are owned and controlled by different people are able to communicate and share data with each other, outsource work to each other, or choose to cooperate to carry out some function together. “Emergent behavior” is thought to potentially exist should distributed agents cooperatively devise functionality that their programmers hadn’t thought of in their original code.

As Toufi Saliba explains in the podcast, cooperation is the key for all emergent behavior, be it AI or human:

“In fact, the reason why we govern this planet as Homo sapiens is not because of our individual level, it is because of our cooperative level. And yet, when you look at AIs today, they all work in silos. They don’t work cooperatively. We’re bringing that cooperation to AIs and we truly believe that the internet of AI will be a lot smarter than any one of those single networks.”

Here’s Dann Toliver explaining a bit more about the TODA files themselves, which HyperCycle uses to move data between computational AI nodes:

“TODA files allow us to provide a representation for a digital asset in the same way that JSON and XML are representations for data. This allows us to peel apart these two layers that seem like they’re stuck together, which say “where is the state being updated?” and “how is the integrity being maintained?”. It seems like these two have to be in the same place, they are very tightly coupled. But what the proof structure of a TODA file allows us to do is to separate them out.
So then I can give you a static proof. I transfer a TODA file to you, and you can validate it without making any network calls. And having done that, you know that the sequence of updates for this asset, the “state” of this asset, has the same integrity — the same uniqueness — as if it were in the system where it originated. So you can take it out of that system, represent it as a TODA file, and pass it to me. I can make modifications to it, and I can prove to you, when I come back with it, that it has the same integrity as if it had been in your system the whole time.”

Other topics covered in the podcast include:

How Collaborative AI Works.
What really constitutes “emergent behavior.”
How HyperCycle uses a modular approach to solve distributed problems and manage digital assets.
How HyperCycle’s infrastructure supports the emergence of general intelligence systems.
The details behind Opencog Hyperon’s new MeTTa language that will soon be able to do smart contracts (that will be compatible with many existing smart contract-enabled systems).

Episode 11’s Featured Guests: Toufi Saliba and Dann Toliver

Toufi is the CEO of HyperCycle and the author of the TODA/IP internet protocol. He is the Global Chair IEEE AI Standard and Chair ACM PB CC, and loves algorithms, cryptography, BFT/ADG Autonomous Decentralized Governance, Distributed Computing, Machine Learning, Game Theory and AI in general.

Dann is CTO of HyperCycle and co-founder of the Toda Project with Toufi Saliva. Dann is also a founder of the Centre for ReDecentralization at the University of Cambridge, where they study fair exchange, secure distributed systems, computational governance and a variety of other topics.

About HyperCycle

The Internet of AI has the potential to be more powerful than any single AI. Currently, AI systems are “siloed” and limited to specific tasks, evolving in a non-cooperative and centralized manner. However, these AIs could work together cooperatively to delegate tasks and improve, collectively forming a kind of “global brain.”

HyperCycle’s mission is to enable any computer to securely partake in this “global brain” of AI computation. Through the convergence of the SingularityNet, Toda/IP and the data structure Earth64, they are now actively participating in the implementation of this network, utilizing the most secure and efficient peer-to-peer technology available in the field of cryptography.

By building AI computation nodes that serve as the synapses for this “global brain” and allowing computers to monetize their computing power and participate in AI computations that serve other AI systems, HyperCycle is facilitating secure peer-to-peer transactions between AIs running on decentralized servers that are owned by different people.

If this decentralized “global brain” of cooperative AIs were to start engaging in unexpected or “emergent” behaviors, (such as making improvements to the overall system in an in a way that its smaller AI parts were not originally coded to perform) it could be considered to be one of the world’s first AGIs.

As AI computation becomes the world’s leading industry, an efficient transmission network is essential. HyperCycle is working alongside SingularityNet, and other prominent individuals from the Bitcoin, Cardano and Ethereum communities to create a secure and efficient peer-to-peer network based on the principles of cryptography.

Learn more in the new white paper: HyperCycle: A Lightweight Agent-System-Based, Ledgerless Blockchain Architecture, Supporting Secure, Efficient, Scalable, Cross-Chain AI Microservices.

About Mindplex

A human connected to other humans and AGIs over laptops via a brain computer interface, Art by Tesfu Asset

The Mindplex Podcast team invites you to join them as they contemplate and learn about this fascinating world. They look forward to meeting you so you can help each other understand the true nature of all the challenges involved as we work together to create a Benevolent Singularity.

Each release of a Mindplex Podcast will be accompanied by a live “pubcast” watch party.

The Mindplex Podcast and Mindplex Magazine — are both part of the Mindplex decentralized media platform spin-off powered by SingularityNet

We invite you to check out the Mindplex website, set up a profile, and perhaps even contribute to the magazine.