Ben Goertzel

Ben Goertzel is an artificial intelligence researcher and founder of SingularityNET. Goertzel is the chief scientist and chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; chairman of the OpenCog Foundation; and advisor to Singularity University. 

He was Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute). Ben Goertzel was the mastermind behind one of the most advanced robots to date, Sophia.

Goertzel is the son of Ted Goertzel, a former professor of sociology at Rutgers University. He left high school after the tenth grade to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Quantitative Studies. Work In May 2007, Goertzel spoke at a Google Tech talk about his approach to creating Artificial General Intelligence. He defines intelligence as the ability to detect patterns in the world and in the agent itself, measurable in terms of emergent behavior of “achieving complex goals in complex environments”. A “baby-like” artificial intelligence is initialized, then trained as an agent in a simulated or virtual world such as Second Life to produce a more powerful intelligence. Knowledge is represented in a network whose nodes and links carry probabilistic truth values as well as “attention values”, with the attention values resembling the weights in a neural network. Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilistic inference engine and a custom version of evolutionary programming. 

He is perhaps best known for his work as chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, the company that created the AI robot Sophia, Ben is a true innovator and a visionary in the field. He is a founder and the current CEO of SingularityNET, a company that focuses on bringing AI and blockchain together to create a decentralized open market for AI; the chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; an advisor to Singularity University; and a research professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University of Technology, China. Ben also served as the director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute). 

Ben’s passions are numerous, including AGI, life extension biology, philosophy of mind, psi, consciousness, complex systems, improvisational music, experimental fiction, theoretical physics, and metaphysics. SingularityNET project The SingularityNET project brings AI and blockchain together to create a decentralized open market for AIs. It’s a medium for the creation and emergence of AGI, a way to roll out superior AI-as-a-service to every vertical market, and a way to enable everyone in the world to contribute to and benefit from AI. In a recent interview, Ben Goertzel said about SingularityNET: 

“SingularityNET is a society of minds created by different people, tools, different AI agents which are collaborating on different problems. SingularityNET lets anyone create, share, and monetize AI services at scale. The world’s decentralized AI network has arrived. SingularityNET was born from a collective will to distribute the power of AI. Sophia, the world’s most expressive robot, is one of their first use cases. Today, she uses multiple AI modules to see, hear, and respond empathetically. Many of her underlying AI modules will be available open-source on SingularityNET.” 

Sophia (Robot) Ben Goertzel is the mastermind behind one of the most advanced AI to date. Sophia is a social humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was first turned on February 14, 2016, and made her first public appearance at South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in mid-March 2016 in Austin, Texas, United States.

In a recent interview with Techcrunch, he shared his visions on AI: “Much of my own motivation is to get a greater level of AI behind all sorts of software like the Hanson Robots, using it as a showcase of the SingularityNET. As this gets smarter we are going to point Sofia’s brain to SingularityNET, moving it from the Hanson cloud into the SingularityNET, such as using computer vision. We should have some substantial improvements by August next year. 

We gain from the ability for anyone around the world to improve Sofia’s mind. We can’t hire all these enthusiasts but we can give them an easy way to contribute to Sofia’s mind." “So a kid could make millions of dollars form putting their computer vision AI into our market, for instance.”