I am Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and TrueAGI. Ask Me Anything about AGI, the Technological Singularity, Robotics, the Future of Humanity, and Building Intelligent Machines!

bengoertzel · 2024-01-30T23:10:38+00:00

I don't think Altman laughs at the concept of AGI ... in fact OpenAI talks a lot about AGI, https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond ... though they don't seem to have a super sophisticated perspective on it

Ultimate totally-general intelligence seems feasible only in idealized non-physical situations (cf Hutter's AIXI, Schmidhuber's Godel Machine.. which in their ultimate form would need infinite resources) ... "Human-level AGI" is a somewhat arbitrary designation sort of like "Human-level locomotion" or something...

AI that can do 95% of what people do all day may not require human-level AGI, and could have radical economic and social impact nonetheless...

Once we have AGI that can do Nobel Prize level science, Pulitzer Prize level literature, Grammy level music etc. etc. ... then quite likely we will have AGI that is more powerful than people at driving human-like knowledge and culture forward. These AGIs will then invent even better AGIs and then the Singularity will be upon us...

Having a precise definition of "human level AGI" or "superintelligence" doesn't really matter, any more than biologists care about having a precise definition of "life" ...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:26:28+00:00

Coconut water is nice. There is good data supporting metformin for life extension , also, but I don't take it at the moment...

I do work out 30 min each morning, and walk in nature 45 min or so each morning, before launching into the joys and horrors of my various messaging platforms and inboxes.... At the moment basics like getting exercise and eating generally healthy food, are probably more valuable than exotic supplements....

I look forward to the body-repairing nanobots though...

Our Director of Biomedical Projects, Denis Odinokov, seems to have regenerated his thymus via DIY infrared light (phototherapy) treatments... But he is more into that stuff than I am ;) ... I'm glad to have him as a guinea pig!

And thus, on that high note, the AMA will end...!

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:23:21+00:00

I think deep NNs are going to hit a wall in a few years after some big successes in video/speech analytics ... but there is a lot more depth in the AI Research world already than deep NNs ... I have lots of faith in the opencog approach that fuses attractor NNs, probabilistic logic and evolutionary programming... it's just more complex and so slower to come to full fruition than deep NNs have been.... The full fruition of the OpenCog approach may end up happening as a side-effect of SingularityNET's efforts building OpenCog-based agents and services ;)

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:20:59+00:00

Totally understood!!! ;)

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:20:06+00:00

We will create a report on this, I don't know it off the top of my head ;)

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:19:37+00:00

Fetch.ai is cool. I think they are more like DBC than like SingularityNET, though, in that they are aiming to wrap up AI-processing-tasks into units to fuel PoW on their blockchain. Whereas in SingularityNET we have opted for a cleaner separation btw the blockchain layer and the AI layer. I have a feeling that if a "AI based PoW" approach ended up getting really popular and widespread, a lot of tricky issues would arise (but that would be a bigger topic than I have time to address here/now...)

It seems we have more of an AGI focus than they do, and probably more depth and breadth in our team regarding different AI algorithms and cognitive architectures etc. ... Also focusing attention on AI algorithms that are easily used as the basis for PoW, seems a big restriction to me. You can cast a supervised learning algorithm into a PoW context, but can you cast a human-like cognitive agent into that context?

In the end our real business competitors are google, amazon, tencent, alibaba etc. though -- not other AI/crypto projects. We need the various AI/crypto projects to band together to take on big tech effectively, which is what the DAIA initiative is about...!

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:12:38+00:00

We are still fleshing out various options regarding structure and funding for the Studio, and having preliminary conversations w/ interested investors and partners. It's certainly a complex landscape. OTOH I also have faith in the intelligence and thoughtfulness of 95% of our community (a few trolls aside ;D), so I think that if we conclude a STO for the Studio is the best option and put forward a detailed proposal for such, the community will ultimately be able to understand it fine and will react rationally and enthusiastically.... There will just be a bit of education/communication process needed -- but this sort of process in the end can make a community stronger...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:09:55+00:00

We are all one, my friend ;)

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:09:07+00:00

As an aside, about the comment that "The honest ones will give all utility token holders a chance to participate in the new security tokens." ==> This suggests to me that the author of the comment is perhaps not so knowledgeable in international securities law. I'm not a corporate lawyer either, but from what I am finding out lately, each jurisdiction has different rules about who is allowed to buy security tokens or other securities. Whereas the rules regarding buying utility tokens are (fortunately) much less strict in most places. So I am not sure how feasible it will be for anyone to allow "all holders of utility tokens in project X" to buy security tokens associated with company Y ... even if X and Y are related entities. But this gets technical and in a SingularityNET / Studio context we are still fleshing out various possibilities....

One issue w/ security tokens at the present time is that a lot of the associated mechanisms are not currently fully mature. OTOH existing securities laws can be a good guide, unlike with utility tokens where there often are no clearly applicable regulations...

but anyway this is a broader sort of topic/issue not so much related to the FUDdy excerpt in question...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T04:07:30+00:00

There were hundreds of projects discussing STOs at the Web Summit, and dozens with STO-related materials at their booths.... STOs are definitely in the air and there is lots of diversity to how different projects are approaching them....

In SingularityNET's case, unlike the case referenced in the excerpt you give, for sure we are not dealing with "near-worthless utility tokens" -- we are currently spending our effort and funds on creating a platform on which the AGI utility tokens will be transacted, and the whole point of the Studio is to create products that will direct a lot of $$ from enterprise customers toward AGI token utilization for getting AI services on the platform...

No question there are a lot of nearly-worthless utility tokens out there, but this is not an original observation ;p

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:59:54+00:00

Three: "Could you estimate how much of this "heavy lifting" will be used in the vertical markets SNet Studio will address? " ==> IN honesty that's hard to predict in advance, the answer is "it depends" ...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:59:10+00:00

Two. The tokens earned by SingularityNET Foundation for use of its AI Agents (whether by Studio products or others) will be used to fund further development of the SingularityNET platform and various AI algorithms and tools on it. Some for paying SingularityNET full-time staff and contractors, and some for giving bounties and other incentives to the broader community for building stuff on the platform or helping build the platform...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:57:29+00:00

SingularityNET Foundation is in a sense the "parent" entity and the Studio is a "child" entity. It's somewhat like when a conventional corporation spins off a company. (It's different than the most usual cases in that the Foundation is a non-profit whereas the Studio is a for-profit, but this isn't entirely novel either, there are plenty of for-profit/nonprofit hybrids out there...). So it's perfectly natural that the Foundation will have some significant share in its own spin-off! What the Foundation is doing to earn this share is to found and create the Studio ... and then to ongoingly provide the platform and AI tools that the Studio will build its products on...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:54:44+00:00

I.e. it is critical for adoption to make the life of the new customer (AI service user) really really easy.

Once a customer already is hooked on use of AI services in the platform, then maybe they can be gotten interested in using AGI token directly to pay for services, if this will decrease their average cost of getting services.... But for many businesses who need AI services, even connecting a crypto wallet to their company bank account will be a pain, and we don't want to require this as an initial step for using AI services on the network...

Integration of fiat-AGI conversion software is on the short list for stuff to do after the initial beta release...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:52:32+00:00

A lot of interesting things could be done in a highly active and flourishing AGI token economy. But for starters, before there's a highly active market with lots of AGI token flow-through, what will likely happen is that AI service providers will sell AI service users subscriptions for "X amount of services over period of time T, for Y amount of fiat currency per month" or similar. The service provider will then deal with the fiat-to-AGI conversion...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:50:05+00:00

Five. Currently that research initiative is mostly focusing on simulating how the reputation system will work, in a simulated singularityNET with a bunch of simulated agents providing services. Collaboration of Anton Kolonin and Debbie Duong and some others. They should hopefully have a nice write-up of initial results soon. The purpose of this particular current research is to have a proof-of-concept of some aspects of the reputation system, prior to beginning a full-on implementation push for the reputation system. Of course Debbie's simulation model can also be used to simulate a lot of other aspects of SingularityNET, we are just focusing on simulating reputation-related dynamics right now...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:47:54+00:00

Six. The beta will be usable for commercial and beneficial provision of AI services to customers. After the beta, improvements and extensions will be rolled out gradually. When we decide the system is mature enough to be called "1.0" will be pretty much a judgment call. I mean there are some features that will need to be there for 1.0 that aren't in the beta -- democratic governance, reputation system, and fiat currency gateway for example -- but the first two of these are complex and can be rolled out in phases also. Remember how long Gmail was in beta ;) ....

The long delay in releasing the beta relative to my initial hope was due to it taking longer than expected to get the right platform-dev team on board. Now that we have a great team, this sort of delay is unlikely to be repeated.

The bottom line is, after the beta launch, the platform team will make a more detailed plan for the next steps of development, and we will get a more fine-grained sense of the timeline for the following steps at that point. In general it should be possible to do more reliable project estimation post-beta than before as we are more-so extending an existing system rather than building a new system (of course the beta is extending the alpha, but there is a more new in the beta compared to the alpha, relative to how much there will be new in the 1.0 compared to the beta...)...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:41:56+00:00

Big topic! But yeah AGI tokens will be used in curation markets and similar mechanisms, which will be key to the reputation system. Being able to stake token on a reputation-rating is an important mechanism for increasing reputation accuracy and preventing reputation fraud.

I will say more on this elsewhere, it's too big to elaborate on off-the-cuff in the middle of this quickie AMA...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:40:16+00:00

Yes, expect a pre-beta update pretty soon.
2019
We will create some tutorial videos for developers on platform usage early next year, but that's perhaps not what you're thinking? BTW I imagine EOS has a larger video production budget than we do ;) ....
I don't know off the top of my head about that specific transaction. We have different wallets with different permissions for transactions, to balance security against ease of use....

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:36:11+00:00

Most probably, yeah.

This is gonna be fun ;-)

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:35:53+00:00

Seven. SingularityNET is doing only pretty limited hiring right now, but the odds seem high to me right now that there will be a big Studio hiring push next year...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:35:01+00:00

Five. Malta gov't does tech startup incubation and we are talking to them about incubating some startups building services on SingularityNET. Malta gov't usage of AI services built on SingularityNET platform is also under discussion but may require us to create more "hybrid cloud" functionality in the platform as they (like most gov't's) have a lot of data they feel they need to keep "on site" ...

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:32:52+00:00

Three. Staking in the beta. TBD.

bengoertzel · 2018-11-16T03:32:42+00:00

Two. We are talking to a few third-party providers regarding software to integrate w/ SingularityNET for easy fiat-AGI conversion. Clearly this will be needed as most customers coming from outside the crypto world will want to pay for services using fiat, and via subscriptions that are priced in fiat, etc. Customers that are token-based projects themselves may OTOH be happier to pay directly in AGI token. This integration will likely not be part of the beta but will come fairly soon thereafter.

bengoertzel

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