The Todalarity is Here, Part Three: A Product Accelerator for Driving the Decentralized AI Revolution

— Ben Goertzel, Toufi Saliba

Foreword:

Parts One and Two of this blog post series cover the synergies between the SingularityNET platform and the TODA protocol, and some of the ins and outs of TODA/IP and related projects and platforms.

In this third and final post in the series we discuss the Todalarity product accelerator, recently launched to foster development in the SingularityNET/TODA ecosystem.

For the decentralized AI ecosystem to fulfill its tremendous promise, more than just amazing new breakthrough technology innovations will be required. Securing massive adoption by the various key types of participants needed to create a full decentralized-AI technosphere, offering everything the centralized big-tech world does and more, will require seeding and exploitation of network effects to a dramatic degree.

For the SingularityNET platform to grow as intended, we need AI algorithm developers to put their code into SingularityNET marketplaces, and we need AI product developers to leverage API calls into the decentralized SingularityNET network rather relying on standard centralized services. The more suppliers there are, the easier it will be for demand to grow, and vice versa. The core vision of SingularityNET involves a recursive network in which many of the same AI agents are both suppliers and users in the network — but before this sort of advanced network arises to a significant degree, it will likely be necessary to get a reasonable number of suppliers and users actively working with the platform in simpler ways.

Singularity Studio, an enterprise AI company spun off from the SingularityNET Foundation, addresses the platform adoption problem most centrally from the demand side. Singularity Studio builds AI products and solutions aimed at large enterprises in key verticals like fintech, IoT and healthtech, wherein the products’ core AI capabilities are derived from API calls to agents running in SingularityNET marketplaces. Subscription fees paid for Singularity Studio products will partly convert into AGI token purchases on the back end, thus explicitly fueling the growth of the SingularityNET economy.

Singularity Studio, along the way to building its enterprise, AI products, will make some of its own basic AI algorithms available on the SingularityNET platform as services and will issue RFAIs (Requests For AI) on the platform offering AGI token rewards to developers who create AI agents of particular value for Studio products.

But the startup ecosystem is going to be at least as critical to the growth of the SingularityNET platform as the enterprise AI world. Each month in various places around the world there are multiple new AI algorithms and new AI-based products created, which would benefit from the SingularityNET platform — and from other aspects of the SingularityNET ecosystem, such as the OpenCog AGI framework and the TODA protocol. In the current state of things, most of these new AI algorithms and products will not move aggressively to utilize the SingularityNET platform or associated tools — not because there isn’t a fundamental fit, but because startup founders are busy and attention is scarce.

This is where Todalarity comes in: a new kind of startup accelerator, aimed at accelerating startup products in a very focused way.

A Different Kind of Startup Accelerator

Unlike traditional software accelerators, Todalarity doesn’t try to teach startup founders how to run their businesses, or to provide commodity advice on legal setup or building management teams. Todalarity provides startups with highly focused guidance that is very hard to come by: Conceptual and technical knowledge and technical know-how regarding how to make AI algorithms and products optimally exploit what the emerging decentralized AI ecosystem has to offer.

Initially formed as a collaboration between Toda. Network, Singularity Studio and SingularityNET Foundation, the Todalarity product accelerator will absorb the smaller-scale X-Lab accelerator program created by SingularityNET in early 2019. By operating at a larger scale with a greater number of companies in its portfolio, Todalarity will be able to offer more value to each startup via economies of scale and network effects.

The proposition Todalarity will offer to its first batch of startups, to be onboarded in early 2020, is simple: $50K of cash and $50K worth of engineering support from SingularityNET and TODA experts, focused on porting startup AI algorithms and products to leverage decentralized AI technologies.

Todalarity companies will include startups creating innovative new AI engines and AI services, and also startups creating products across multiple vertical markets that require AI services plugged in on the back end. Todalarity companies will be encouraged to create SingularityNET AI agents that interact with the AI agents created by other Todalarity companies, as well as other AI agents on the SingularityNET platform. They will also be encouraged to use the TODA network where appropriate for secure decentralized messaging and transactions between software components in their respective product niches.

The growth of Todalarity portfolio companies will be boosted by the growth of the SingularityNET and TODA ecosystems, and vice versa. Singularity Studio and the various companies in the Toda. Network and TODAQ families will operate with an acute awareness of the services offered by Todalarity companies, purchasing their services on the back end of their products as appropriate.

Benefits to Startups

Through their close connection to the SingularityNET and TODA teams and ecosystems, Todalarity startup founders will derive value in a wide variety of ways, e.g.

• Architectural insights: How to use blockchain elements to enable AI solutions to grow
• AI Innovations: AI algorithms beyond the mainstream, appropriate for the application domain and including transfer learning and lifelong learning
• Product acceleration: benefit from cross-functional Blockchain and AI ecosystems to build Blockchain-based AI products faster
• Competitive ecosystem growth: Multiplicative synergy between startups and existing companies always on the cutting edge
• Global presence: Leveraging SingularityNET and TODA offices in Toronto, Seoul, Hong Kong, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Bangalore, Belo Horizonte, Dubai, Addis Ababa

In the broad quest to create a decentralized AI ecosystem that is truly global-scale and transformational, the Todalarity product accelerator fills a significant gap: How to break into the busy minds of top-notch startup founders and guide them toward making their algorithms and products leverage emerging decentralized AI networks and related technologies.

Growing networks like TODA and SingularityNET critically involves double-sided network effects in which the supply and demand sides must be grown at once and synergetically. Given that most of the innovation in the AI algorithm and product worlds come from students, startups or independent developers, fostering platform engagement from these exploratory and entrepreneurial people and companies has to be a key element of any workable growth strategy. This is why we have formed Todalarity as a new entrant in the SingularityNET and TODA world — to help AI-related startups by helping them integrate into the AI ecosystem of the rapidly unfolding future.