By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 12th, 2024
Cisco Systems Inc. announced that SingularityNET’s blockchain-based platform will host its decentralized AGI project focused on intellectual tasks instead of automating menial tasks.
Networking giant Cisco Systems decided to go with the blockchain-based platform developed by SingularityNET to host its decentralized AGI project.
SingularityNET is a startup that labels itself as a “decentralized artificial intelligence” company, and them working with Cisco Systems on such an ambitious project is a big deal.
When talking about artificial intelligence technologies it should be clear that this is in no way new technology. But the truth is, its development is something that sometimes scares people especially when the company as Cisco says that they want to create more advanced AI technologies that will soon be able to surpass humans in their ability to learn and perform new tasks.
In a joint statement, Dr. Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET CEO, said:
“The scale of the AGI deployments needed by a partner like Cisco is going to be tremendous, and we are working hard to make sure our AGI tools and our blockchain-based platform is up to the task.”
He added that SingularityNET’s platform democratizes AI by decentralizing its source and by preventing any single force or player from hoarding computers’ capacity to learn.
This partnership is a strong confirmation of SingularityNET’s technologies, that also include a blockchain-based, decentralized marketplace for AI algorithms, and various deep neural net models for computer vision and language understanding.
Its biggest project is a customized version of the OpenCog Advanced General Intelligence engine, an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to “human-equivalent AGI.”
Goertzel said Cisco and SingularityNET here see the potential in building AGI together. He commented that this technology is “expected to provide tremendous commercial benefit to whoever develops it.”
“This benefit may initially take the form of a generation of ‘Narrow AGI’ systems that infuse general intelligence into products in specific vertical markets like, say, advertising, medical research, computer networking or financial analytic.”
As it’s already said, AI is not new technology – however, AGI is. It is an emerging new field within AI, or some might even say a more superior form of it. Traditional AI generally refers to the ability of a machine to imitate human know-how, such as learning and problem-solving – let’s say playing poker or studying some medical data However, most AI models are still pretty much basic, specialized on training machines at a single task – for example, a memory game.
Even though there is no real definition of AGI, most experts agree that it refers to a machine that has the same level of intelligence as a human and is therefore able to learn new concepts and tasks in just the same way a human can, without any previous training. Good examples are given by Hollywood in characters as are C3P0 from “Star Wars,” HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey” or Agent Smith from “The Matrix.” Goertzel added:
“To really build a global decentralized thinking machine we are going to need to put a lot of complicated ingredients together, and the collaboration between Cisco and SingularityNET has the potential to accelerate things tremendously.”