SingularityNET, ASI Alliance, AGI: Dinis Guarda Interviews Janet Adams, COO Of SingularityNET

In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, Janet Adams, COO of SingularityNET, discusses the challenges and innovations in decentralised AI and AGI development, highlighting SingularityNET's role in tackling big tech dominance and fostering diverse, ethical AI solutions. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Janet Adams is a decentralised AI expert, tech entrepreneur and speaker with published works on Ethics and Regulation of AI. She is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at SingularityNET, leading the operations of SingularityNET Foundation and the growth of the SNET network and ecosystem.  

Janet also serves as a Board Director of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance. The ASI Alliance is a global collective formed by Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol, and later joined by CUDOS, focused on developing decentralised Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).

During the interview, Janet shared her experiences from 20 years of working in the banking industry about AI adoption and automation:

"The challenge with bringing artificial intelligence into the financial services industry is education. AI is a pretty complex topic; it's not something that can be really skimmed or understood to a level that makes an accountable executive comfortable to implement new sciences and new technologies in banking.

What we found in financial services is that lean six sigma workflow automation process automation robotic automation is very difficult to achieve successfully in a way that achieves the full ROI of the envisioned project.

We're now on the brink of really intelligent AI that's not just deep neural networks running statistics; we can now learn from environments outside of the training data. We’re really at a time where all those dreams I had back at university of how we could really dramatically increase productivity in industries, it’s about to happen."

SingularityNet: Ecosystem and Innovations

Janet discusses SingularityNET's ecosystem, its approach to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the innovations that are driving the development of decentralised AI technologies:

"SingularityNET was founded in 2017 by Dr Ben Goertzel to develop AGI and decentralised AI for the benefit of all humanity. Ben had decided at age three that he was going to build a robot smarter than the robot on Star Trek.

We have around 100 AI scientists working directly for us, and we have more developers working in our community. We embrace all kinds of AI in our AGI approach, unlike big tech and OpenAI, which are very focused on a deep neural network approach. Our OpenCog Hyperon platform uniquely brings and allows all of these types of AI to interact with each other. It’s to the best of our knowledge, the most advanced AGI tech stack on the planet.

AGI is a massively super hard problem to tackle, and when I look at the depth, the knowledge, the skill, the diversity of AGI approaches we are pursuing with these brilliant teams across the planet, I really can’t imagine any other technology company has got that depth of research.

We are the only credible AGI contender in the AGI race outside of Big Tech. The mission is for web 3 decentralised AI to be the birthplace of AGI to tackle big tech dominance and bring these tools and make them available and deploy them in an ethical way for the benefit of humanity.

AGI is a seismic shift in the power structures of our planet, and with dramatic potential to reduce the inequalities that our human systems have built.

We joined forces with Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol to form the Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) Alliance. By adding CUDOS decentralised compute team to the alliance, we have scale and we can really tackle big tech.

We have the most comprehensive suite of toolkits available for Web 3: agents, compute, data governance, and AI offering. We’re very proud to work with our partners at the ASI Alliance, and we all have a shared mission, which is for Web 3 decentralised AI to be the birthplace of AGI. Our mission is to tackle big tech dominance and bring these tools and make them available and deploy them in an ethical way for the benefit of humanity."

ASI Alliance empowering AGI 

“We are very, very grateful to all our communities, the community now, the ASI community, but the communities that came together from Singularity Net, Ocean Protocol, Fetch.ai, and CUDOS to form the community base of Singularity Net. The community is now seeing the first products being released from Singularity Net this year, and coming now, the absolute incredible brilliance of Ben Goertzel is, I spoke with him recently about this, it's blossoming.

I used to say AGI is going to be number one because our technologies are going to dramatically, fundamentally change the world, and we’re already seeing some benchmarking for just even small parts of our toolkit, which are becoming available in products.

I see an extremely bright and hitherto unprecedented growth in the crypto markets in the global size of the cryptocurrency movement, driven by ASI.

I have the greatest admiration for the cryptocurrency movement, the cipherpunks who started cryptocurrency, for me, the audaciousness of saying the financial system of the world doesn't work for everybody, we're going to start a new one. It's just, you know, one of the most pivotal and important steps in our evolution as a species and has, as you say, laid the groundwork for us at SingularityNet and for all of these decentralised movements.

We have Quello, which is a deep research project that does an absolutely beautiful, really, really usable knowledge graph visualisation. We have ASI Create to enable all of the agents to speak with each other, to communicate together, to perform actions together.

We have our Hyperon MVP platform being released, we have our Meta Cycle AI Blockchain layer, ASI One, ASI Zero, blockchain being released, which is optimised for AI on the internet and highly scalable, highly secure, and highly private.

Crypto at the moment is three and a half percent of that [global economy], how much of that hundred trillion is driven by technology and imagine like massively serious proportions of that flooding into Web3.”

AI Arms Race and AI Divide

Janet discusses the current state of AI research, emphasising the importance of diversity in AI development:

"Diversity in our AI approach is clearly essential. In evolutionary sciences, it is diversity that has enabled evolution and progress.

Research has shown that diverse teams make better decisions because, if I come back to the banking crisis of 2008, there were no dissenting voices, huge advantages to better decision making and better choices when you have different ways of thinking involved in every finding a solution for every problem.

There are 150 to 200,000 AI researchers, but 99% of them are focused on neural networks, which have their limitations. 

We have the most diverse leadership team in technology, and diversity is key because we need to make sure that the AGI we develop is for the benefit of everybody, not just one socioeconomic group.

We can have unlimited, infinite scalability in our developer base. We can develop decentralised developer communities, without us having to manage them in a centralised way.

We can get way more than 150,000 or 200,000 developers because we’ve got the whole globe—presence in Africa, India, South America, and developers all over the world want to work with us.

We can have all of that diversity of developers with the full suite of diversity of AI methods and tools that can interact with each other on our hyper platform and what that will give rise to is like natural evolution of methods and natural evolution of of methods evolution of evolutionary algorithms or logical reasoning systems or neurosymbolic methods or all of the classic methods they can evolve together and the pace of AI progress and development is blistering in the planet at the moment i don't know how many new algorithms a day get get released and invented.

Decentralised AI will evolve faster than centralised technology because we can deploy AI in a more cost-effective, scalable, and environmentally friendly manner. A centralised technology stack running on GCP or AWS is expensive, environmentally unsustainable, and its scalability is limited by the resources of the organisation. Decentralised AI is more cost-effective, scalable, and growing faster.

We’re in with such a good chance of winning this AGI race, and it’s a very good thing that we have leaders like Ben and Trent McConna who are pioneers in using this not for personal wealth but for the wealth of everyone in the world."