Part 2 — SingularityNET 2021 Year-End Update

…and a sneak peek at Q1 2022!

Hello Singularitarians -

This second of four blog posts will be a walk-through of the AI Development Team and the OpenCog Hyperon Team milestones for 2021, directly aligned with the Phase 2 roadmap.

Don’t miss the updates on:

• Part 1 — Products & Infrastructure — Development, Blockchain, and UX/UI Teams
• Part 2 — AI & AGI Research and Development Teams (This post)
• Part 3 — Community Outreach, Marketing, & Partnerships Teams (coming soon…)
• Part 4 — Operations, Progressive Decentralization, and Upcoming DEEP Fund (coming soon…)

The two teams covered today are charged with developing and expanding SingularityNET’s AI systems:

• Team 1 — AI Development Team — designing and building narrow AI solutions for the platform, ecosystem/Spin-off projects, and for global collaboration and outreach
• Team 2 — OpenCog Hyperon Team (AGI Framework) — designing and creating OpenCog Hyperon, an AGI framework that enables infinitely scalable AI service collaboration, creating a higher order of intelligent systems.

In 2021, AI/AGI research and development resources were prioritized to support the Phase 2 cornerstone of Growing AI to seed utility on the SingurityNET Platform -

• Increasing intelligence of the Platform itself (e.g., AI-DSL)
• Ecosystem spin-off projects, AI’s to seed the Platform and grow adoption momentum
• AI research Partnerships for outreach and growth
• Develop an architecture for beneficial AGI through the OpenCog Hyperon AGI Framework

Team 1 —
AI Development Team

The AI Development Team includes top talent from across the globe. The team is developing world-class AI for the entire SingularityNET Ecosystem. They guide and coordinate research and development central to AI usage now, which shapes how benevolent AGI will unfold in the future.

Achievements 2021 — AI Development Team

The number of projects and partners that the AI Team was engaged with during 2021 is too long to cover in this post (that’s not including the projects and partners we can’t talk about yet.) However, in the spirit of brevity, here are many of the highlights:

SingularityNET Platform Advances/Additions

• AI-DSL Phase 1 complete (technical summary) — including bringing in Idris expertise to develop language models
• AI-DSL phase 2 underway(Cardano Catalyst Proposal, Proposal Summary Video)
• Prepare Tononi Phi code for release on SingularityNET marketplace

Ecosystem spin-off projects

• Covid-19 simulations research for an unreleased app (App Store COVID App restrictions)
• See Agent-Based Modeling Part 1 and Part 2
• TrueAGI — Provided planning support and fundamental research understanding
• Significant progress with AI components for all spin-offs — SingularityDAO, SophiaDAO, Awakening Health, Rejuve, Mindplex, etc.
• Onboard a Complex Systems Analyst AI expert to model SingularityDAO dynamic asset manager (DAM) trading process

AI research Partnerships and outreach for growth

• Bio-AI Team entered into 2 Cancer AI-Research Partnerships
• MOSES Penalty Regularization + synthetic data (another Bio AI initiative)
• Successful AGI-21 conference in Palo Alto, CA USA
• Four days mixed Virtual and Live event
• Ten keynotes speeches from 10 AGI luminaries
• Program Committee received 50 submitted papers, and accepted 36 long papers for presentation at the conference
• Soil Health Initiatives Partnership with Arizona State University
• Renewable Energy Initiative with Arizona State University Lightworks
• African Agritech initiative

Cardano AI Partnerships Initiatives

• AI-DSL Initiative (mentioned above) — is a coordinated project supported by IOHK and Cardano
• Catalyst Fund7 — SingularityNET AI teams submitted 7 proposals for the SingularityNET-Cardano Collaboration through AI challenge
• There are several AI for Africa initiatives, which have been moving forward over 2021
• Scam Block Project for IOHK
• Cardano summit in Wyoming, including:
• Ben Goertzel’s Keynote presentation A Singular Vision
• Fireside chat with Charles Hoskinson, Ben Goertzel… which was also the big debut of Grace, the elder care robot; a discussion on AI & Robots

The AI team also collaborates heavily with the Singularity Studio group, which bring innovative AI solutions to enterprise customers. Read more about Singularity Studio partnerships and upcoming proprietary projects in their 2021 year-end update.

Here is Matt Iklé, SIngularityNET Chief AI Officer, giving an update for the AI Development Team for 2021:

Next Steps Q1 2022 and beyond — AI Development Team

• Continue guiding AI-DSL in its phase 2 efforts — optimizing initial use case AI
• Continue maturing AI systems for Rejuve, Mindplex, and other Spin-off Projects
• Release of Tononi Phi code on SingularityNET marketplace (Tononi Phi is a framework for quantifying the amount of integrated information in a cognitive system — theoretically a method of quantifying “consciousness” in SohpiaVERSE, Awakening Health, and potential use in other projects)
• Help USAID DAI efforts in Ukraine
• Continue COMLEX (Coupled Map Lattice Experimentation) Framework — A framework for experimentation with a wide variety of ”2D coupled map lattice” based dynamical systems
• Kickoff the new Cardano sidechain initiative “HyperCycle”

Right now, Chief AI Officer Matt Iklé is encouraging community involvement — The community is invited to participate in the ongoing AI/AGI developers discussion on the Telegram AI developers channel and Discord channel. Matt is also exploring more collaborative processes to coordinate AI ideation and development, between the AI team and the community, especially in conjunction with the DEEP fund initiative coming soon.

Team 2 Update —
OpenCog Hyperon Team (AGI Framework)

OpenCog Hyperon is the redesign, from the ground up, of the original “OpenCog Classic” framework for AGI that will allow massive increases in network scalability and intelligence. OpenCog Hyperon is a leap beyond the capabilities of individual approaches to AGI or their direct hybridization, achieving another level of capability entirely. OpenCog Hyperon will be a framework for global AGI development, as TensorFlow or PyTorch have widely adopted deep learning development frameworks.

Per Phase 2, once the OpenCog Hyperon framework has been built, the ability for collaborative AI processes on the SingularityNET Platform will be exponential. This will open the door to increasingly intelligent networks of self-assembling AI agents…enabling the emergence of AGI, artificial general intelligence.

Background — OpenCog Hyperon Framework & Theory

For those unfamiliar with OpenCog Classic or OpenCog Hyperon, here is a high-level overview:

The basic design idea starts with the Atomspace, a metagraph knowledge store. Several AI learning and reasoning agents read from and write to the Atomspace concurrently and cooperatively. The various AI agent interactions must be cooperative, helping each other rather than counteracting or confusing each other — a theoretical concept formalized as “cognitive synergy.

An extremely simplified representation of the framework is: a set of specialty thinkers (i.e., various kinds of narrow AI components) all working together on a problem displayed on a common blackboard (the Atomspace). One agent advances the problem solving on the shared blackboard through its specialty, and when stuck, another type of agent steps in to move the problem forward in a new direction.

Coordinating these diverse agents to work synergistically is incredibly challenging. However, the intelligence and genuine understanding that will occur through the complex and nuanced interacting system and data store will be groundbreaking in its capacity.

Achievements 2021 — OpenCog Hyperon Team

The OpenCog Hyperon team moved the new framework forward considerably in 2021, formalizing many of the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the design and cementing these specifications in development and implementation.

MeTTa — a native development language for OpenCog Hyperon

• Preliminary MeTTa prototyping
• Achieved consensus on MeTTa language features and developed the first specification
• MeTTa interpreter language candidate evaluation, including Idris and Typed Racket
• Rust was chosen for further prototyping
• Reimplemented early C++ prototype functionality in Rust, with improvements
• Added probabilistic dependent types and recursion schemes as motivating examples to be used or handled by MeTTa

Distributed AtomSpace

• Proposed a new design for the Distributed AtomSpace; prototyping is progressing rapidly
• Completed benchmarking of initial speed for the DAS
• Testing wiki2amr data collection for Distributed Atomspace

Minecraft Testbed Progress

• Minecraft agent #1, neuro-symbolic agent
• Planning and initial experimentation in the flat world, including subsymbolic skills orchestrated by symbolic real-time reasoning capable of achieving various goals
• Initial use of visual input to operate in the default 3D world, achieving multi-step goals like finding water, mining iron ore, crafting a lever without the need for training or reprogramming for each goal separately.
• Minecraft agent #2, temporal reasoning agent
• Temporal reasoning creates multi-step “cognitive schematics” to find and collect diamonds in locked houses.
• Work was begun on updating and developing the AtomSpace visualizer to display an agent’s state better as it pursues its goals.

The OpenCog Hyperon team is also working closely with the TrueAGI project. TrueAGI will focus on providing Hyperon-based services to enterprises across various vertical markets. TrueAGI will give product-specific use-cases ambitious proto-AGI goals while further supporting research and development of the OpenCog Hyperon framework. These projects will speed the development and utilization of OpenCog Hyperon-based AI/AGI solutions. This will accelerate bringing OpenCog Hyperon solutions to the SingularityNET Platform.

Here is the lead for the OpenCog Hyperon Project, Dr. Alexey Potapov, presenting the 2021 OpenCog Hyperon Team update:

Next Steps Q1 2022 and beyond — OpenCog Hyperon Team

• Extend the MeTTa language prototype; in particular, support for type systems
• Developing Minecraft agent reasoning in MeTTa
• Extend the Minecraft neuro-symbolic agent with free exploration and improve its capability to achieve distant goals
• Minecraft agent #1, neuro-symbolic agent, baseline demo release
• Minecraft agent #2, temporal reasoning agent, initial demo release
• Feasibility study of the DAS (Distributed Atomspace) design
• Preparation for TrueAGI token launch

Right now, Dr. Alexey Potapov is encouraging community involvement

Contribute to trueagi.io GitHub, or participate in AGI Discussion Forum — OpenCog; to learn more about the original OpenCog — Classic platform, which still forms a lot of the thinking for the Hyperon version, check out the Open Cognition Project wiki and foundation, and Preliminary Hyperon design ideas.

Please join the discussion on the Telegram AGI developers channel and Discord channels, and start planning to attend AGI-22!