SingularityNET — The Past, The Present and The Future.
In the nearly-two-years since the SingularityNET Token Generation Event, both the AI and blockchain worlds have gone through a remarkable number of changes.
Cryptocurrency markets have boomed and busted and reoriented; some major corporations and governments have adopted blockchain in critical roles whereas others have abandoned their blockchain initiatives in frustration. New secure decentralized algorithms and new tokenomic business mechanisms have flourished.
AI has increasingly penetrated all areas of industry, and neural models for speech, language and vision have become an everyday part of life. Google Assistant’s interpreter mode — to name one random but exciting example — is a decent emulation of the Star Trek Communicator. At the same time, concern about the oligopolization of AI and the democratization of personal-data analytics has become far more widespread. With Microsoft’s $1B investment into OpenAI, the concept of Artificial General Intelligence has become truly mainstream, and is now on the tips of the tongues of national leaders and business leaders worldwide.
The intersection of AI and blockchain, which many people perceived as futuristic and unusual in late 2017, is now the subject of a wild cornucopia of conferences, projects and startups.
Alongside all these other incredible changes and advances, SingularityNET’s team of 50+ AI and blockchain professionals has been steadily hard at work, creating a decentralized software platform capable of hosting the world’s commercial and beneficial AI services, and serving as a breeding ground for tomorrow’s artificial general intelligences.
2017 was the year of SingularityNET’s conception, when the vision of a decentralized AI platform and emerging global intelligence came together with the realities of Ethereum smart contracts and modern tokenomic network design.
2018 was the year of SingularityNET’s birth as a complex software system. The early-stage alpha code from late 2017, with its evocative but limited functionalities, was upgraded to a dramatically more robust design. The project founders pulled together a top-rank engineering and science team encompassing multiple subfields of AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and began systematically realizing the concepts from the original whitepaper.
2019 was the year the SingularityNET back-end software finally came to maturity. Starting with the beta release in February, a sequence of improvements was rolled out as the year progressed. An array of AI services embodying neural, evolutionary and logic-based AI were rolled out on the platform, serving as demonstrations of how to integrate various AI tools into a decentralized platform, and as exercises in breaking down AI algorithmic processes into autonomous services capable of serving as citizens in a society of AI minds.
In September, 7 months after the original beta release, we released the Beta v2, containing new features and a massively improved UI.
Then in November we launched the PayPal interface for the platform, allowing service users to pay in fiat or crypto according to their preference — achieving a delicate balance between AI democratization and mass adoption by reducing the friction for 286 million PayPal users.
To cap the year off, in late December we released the RFAI (Request for AI) portal, allowing community members to offer token rewards to anyone who creates an AI service on the platform meeting their specified requirements.
Throughout the year our in-house AI R&D team was also hard at work, making breakthroughs in deep neural nets for vision and language, evolutionary and logical AI for longevity biology, computational linguistics and more. Some of these advances are represented in services now available on the platform; many more will find their way to the platform next year.
Spreading the Love
Alongside these technical advances, in 2019 the SingularityNET Foundation signed high-level partnerships with Fortune500 enterprises such as Cisco, Dominos, Enexis, PingAn and PICC. Bringing large centralized corporations into the fold of a decentralized AI ecosystem is not an instantaneous process, but each of these collaborations has been progressing in its own way since its inception, and it’s expected that in 2020 there will be several exciting public initiatives involving SingularityNET and its corporate partners.
2019 was also a landmark year for spreading the message of democratic, decentralized AI. It is fair to say that, due to the media attention the project has received and the demonstrated quality of the software SingularityNET has put out, Dr. Goertzel has now become recognized globally as the number one authority when it comes to explain the benefits of decentralized AI.
The momentum from the end of 2018, when SingularityNET CEO Dr. Ben Goertzel was a guest on the Joe Rogan podcast, continued unabated and in some ways accelerated. Dr. Goertzel was interviewed by a lengthy procession of mainstream media outlets including the BBC, CNBC, and CBS, and during the summer spoke with Europe’s number one tech podcast, London Real TV as well as the Financial Times Tech Podcast.
SingularityNET’s decentralized AI vision and platform were described at the world’s largest technology focused events such as the Web Summit in Lisbon (for the 3rd year in a row), the World Economic Forum in Davos, The Economist Summit in Hong Kong, the AI Everything event in Dubai and the AI Expo in Tokyo. And to finish off the year with a bang, just last week Ben was a featured pre-Christmas guest on Ivan on Tech.
Driven by this media attention and the quality of the project’s released software, we also had a 50% growth across SingularityNET’s community and social platforms this year. There are now more than 150,000 Singularitarians worldwide. While community conversations can get heated sometimes (we wouldn’t want it any other way), any observer will witness the passionate commitment to the cause and the project direction among the community.
One emerging source of new community members was the series of organized meetups and developer workshops. Some particularly well-attended events were our technical workshops in Amsterdam, London, Cambridge University, Tokyo, and Dubai. We also took part in our first hackathon in April 2019, with our own dedicated team at the world’s largest blockchain hackathon, Odyssey 2.0. A greater number of meetups, hackathons and workshops is planned for 2020, given the recent advances in the platform which make it even more timely to onboard new AI and product developers into the SingularityNET ecosystem.
During 2019, the project has also progressed in alignment with the original whitepaper on the governance side, via the election of the SingularityNET Supervisory Council, a governing body intended specifically to represent token-holder interests, complementing the SingularityNET Foundation’s Board of Governors and Board of Directors. The council election in June was an exercise in decentralized democracy involving hundreds of voters from 50+ different countries.
As the year progressed, we came to the realization that some of our internal SingularityNET initiatives were getting too ambitious to continue in the form of project teams within SingularityNET. We launched an enterprise-AI software spinoff called Singularity Studio, to focus on leveraging the SingularityNET platform to meet the needs of large corporations on multiple vertical markets, including finance, clinical medicine and smart cities.
The Rejuve AI-for-life-extension project, the NuNet decentralized compute resources project, and the Xccelerando Media project began preparations for spinning out as separate entities, seeded by SingularityNET Foundation. We began the X-Labs initiative to provide extra support to these spinoffs alongside a number of external projects eager to come onto the platform as early adopters.
The Todalarity is Here
The Ethereum blockchain has been a tremendous asset to SingularityNET in its development so far, however, it’s also clear that the current version of Ethereum cannot handle the full demands of the SingularityNET architecture. What we need is an underlying blockchain platform that will allow flexible, dynamic, rapid, low-cost creation and interaction of AI services — so that, for instance, in the course of answering a single user question during a natural language dialogue, a dozen AI agents can be consulted and a half-dozen new ones creates.
It may be that Ethereum advances fast enough to meet these needs, but we don’t want to bet the project’s future on this, and so in 2019 we have begun a deep collaboration with the TODA network, with whom we are exploring alternative routes, leveraging their unique replicated-ledger-free decentralized secure messaging platform. A SingularityNET-on-TODA prototype has been created and tested, with early experimental success.
Additionally, in collaboration with TODA Network, SingularityNET and Singularity Studio have formed a novel software product accelerator called Todalarity, led by TODA founder Toufi Saliba and aimed at providing financial, technical and business support to startups interested in putting their products on the SingularityNET and/or TODA platforms.
2020 Onward Toward the Singularity with Passion and Gratitude
All of us at SingularityNET are more futurists than past-ists — so while we’ve done a lot of exciting things in the last year, we’re spending far more of our attention looking forward to 2020.
Our plans for next year are far too numerous and complex to cram into the conclusion of a blog post, but a teaser can’t hurt. Among other things we are aiming to:
- Launch the AI Publisher developer portal, allowing any developer to publish their algorithm to the marketplace
- Completing our fiat-crypto gateway, so that AI service providers have the option of getting paid in fiat (just as AI service users now have the option to pay in fiat using the PayPal interface)
- Launch a version of the weighted-liquid-rank reputation system on the platform (following the extensive simulations of this reputation system we did during 2019)
- Launch a form of staking on the platform, intended to assist with the underlying tokenomic mechanics of the fiat-crypto gateway as well as the reputation system
- Run a series of hackathons aimed at AI algorithm, model and product developers
- Complete the spinning-out of projects such as Singularity Studio, Rejuve, Nunet and Xccelerando
- Launch a series of novel AI services on the platform that leverage the combination of the OpenCog AGI platform with deep neural nets and evolutionary algorithms, addressing functions like biomedical data analysis and smart home operation. The goal here is both to provide useful and profitable services, and to give working examples of how to create complex services that leverage multiple AI agents running according to different AI paradigms to deliver practical services.
And that’s just for starters… It’s looking to be one amazing year!
We have to admit that sometimes we get frustrated things aren’t going even faster. Each year, the centralized AI oligopoly gets more and more powerful — powered by literally trillions of dollars in resources. Each year, more and more people get old and die, suffer from physical or mental illnesses, or spend their days working at unsatisfying jobs just to acquire the materials needed for a comfortable lives — all problems that could be solved by a decentralized AI ecosystem populated by well-crafted narrow AIs and democratically guided, beneficial AGI.
Nothing would make us happier than having a full-on SingularityNET decentralized AI ecosystem, as envisioned in our whitepaper, suddenly appear with full functionality and beautiful, polished usability — so the people of the world could start using it unreservedly to improve their lives and move full speed ahead to a positive Technological Singularity.
But of course, this isn’t how things work. Amazing innovations like the Internet, mobile phones, computer chips, vaccines and antibiotics and electrical power stations all took a certain amount of time to move from design and invention to completion and scalable rollout and adoption. By the standards of history, our progress toward democratic, decentralized AI is actually moving extremely rapidly.
Alongside the lessons of more ancient history, it’s worth briefly reflecting on the growth curves of Amazon.com, the open-source movement, and Bitcoin adoption (among many similar examples). Note how these curves started off rather flat-looking — and then zoomed upwards. That’s the nature of exponential growth, and the nature of network effects. SingularityNET, and decentralized AI and AGI in general, are now at an early stage of their respective exponential growth curves. But they’re not going to stay there for long.
As 2019 verges into 2020, we on the SingularityNET team feel privileged to have the chance to spend a few years of our lives bringing the world’s first decentralized AI platform from vision into scaled-up and widely-adopted reality.
Thank you, our treasured community, for your ongoing support. For those of you who celebrate special events this time of year, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, Merry Kwanzaa and Happy Gregorian Calendar New Year. For everyone else, please just accept our invitation to richly enjoy the present moment of your existence. Right here, right now — on the eve of the Technological Singularity, which we are helping to eventuate with our efforts — it’s good to be alive!
