In October’s edition of our Ecosystem Roundup, we present the latest advancements and milestones across our decentralized AI Platform and the wider SingularityNET ecosystem. Key highlights include our $1.25M in grants to fund breakthrough AGI R&D and our strategic partnership with Tenstorrent to develop AGI-optimized hardware and software architectures.
Additionally, we provide progress reports from our Ambassadors and ecosystem projects, highlighting the dynamic growth within our ecosystem.
Finally, we highlight notable media coverage, cementing SingularityNET’s position as a leader in the decentralized AI space.
We are offering $1.25M in grants to advance decentralized, beneficial, and benevolent Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). By funding individuals to create AI code design to work with OpenCog Hyperon, an AGI framework running on the SingularityNET decentralized AI Platform, these Deep Funding grants will support groundbreaking research projects that advance AGI technology toward broad human benefit.
For these advanced AGI R&D grants, proposals are reviewed and selected by small panels of domain experts from SingularityNET’s research teams, who are specially qualified to assess the submissions. Currently, 13 OpenCog Hyperon challenges are open for submissions, some of which allow for multiple winners, with over $1 million in total funding available. After a 30-day window for proposal submission, which may be extended at SingularityNET’s discretion, the evaluation process will begin. Once awarded, grant recipients will have between three to nine months to complete their research and development, depending on the scope and complexity of the project.
Each of these grants has been specifically composed by Dr. Ben Goertzel and the OpenCog Hyperon team to catalyze research that aligns closely with SingularityNET’s research and vision toward beneficial decentralized AGI. Even a handful of highly successful projects from this initiative could create a powerful ripple effect, accelerating breakthroughs and driving significant advancements in AGI, with the potential to transform the trajectory of the entire field.
Learn more and submit your proposals today on the Deep Funding portal.
In October, we announced a strategic partnership with Tenstorrent, a leader in high-performance computing architecture, to accelerate the evolution of AGI. This collaboration will push the boundaries of next-gen hardware and neural-symbolic AI architectures, opening new frontiers for AI applications across industries.
Through a structured, three-phase strategy, SingularityNET and Tenstorrent will combine their expertise to develop AGI-optimized hardware and software architectures:
The Strategic Initiatives Office (SIO) is a cross-functional team dedicated to advancing SingularityNET’s position in the decentralized AI space. The SIO focuses on the strategic design, proposal, and execution of SingularityNET’s initiatives, focusing on commercialization, revenue modeling, and resource orchestration.
The following table shows the number of currently active partnerships:
In October 2024, the ASI Alliance collaborated with Solana to introduce an AI-focused track at the Copa America online hackathon, one of Latin America’s largest Web3 startup events. This initiative, marking the Alliance’s first official hackathon collaboration in the LATAM region, was spearheaded by SingularityNET’s SIO team. The hackathon promoted AI-driven innovation within decentralized ecosystems, offering LATAM developers a unique opportunity to leverage Fetch.ai’s Agentverse platform and explore agent-based applications within blockchain environments.
The AI track was designed to introduce Solana’s developer ecosystem to the ASI Alliance’s decentralized AI tools, showcasing how autonomous AI agents can streamline complex workflows in decentralized applications. Through this initiative, the Alliance aimed to forge strong connections with Solana’s Web3 community, creating pathways for developers to engage with AI technology and potentially join the ASI ecosystem.
To support participant success, the Fetch.ai Innovation Lab, led by Sana Wajid, provided comprehensive resources including mentorship, technical documentation, and optional workshops. This support structure enabled developers to thoroughly explore agent-based systems on the Solana network, fostering an environment conducive to innovation and experimentation. The collaborative framework encouraged participants to develop novel solutions combining AI capabilities with blockchain infrastructure, furthering the integration of these transformative technologies.
The success of the AI track at Copa America Solana was significantly driven by the dedication of the SingularityNET LATAM community. Community leaders and Ambassadors Guillermo Lucero, Ines Gaviña, Daniela Alves, and André de Carvalho played key roles in fostering engagement and building bridges between the SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Solana communities. Their efforts were instrumental in strengthening the ASI Alliance’s presence and impact within the Latin American region.
The event concluded with CheckNFT Agent emerging as the winning project, exemplifying the innovative potential of combining AI and blockchain technologies. Prior to the announcement, the ASI community shared a video presentation, showcasing the Alliance’s vision and ongoing commitment to supporting technological advancement in LATAM.
The ASI Alliance remains committed to building upon the success of the Copa America hackathon to further advance decentralized AI development. More opportunities to engage, collaborate, and contribute to the development of decentralized beneficial AI solutions will be announced soon.
The ‘SingularityNET’s Technical Tuesdays’ series explores the development of the SingularityNET decentralized AI Platform, advances in the OpenCog Hyperon framework for AGI and beyond, and highlights how we are translating our AI and AGI R&D ideas into systems for real-world use cases.
On October 29th, 2024, we were joined by Dr. Ben Goertzel, Dr. Matt Iklé, Jan Horlings, and Khellar Crawford to discuss our $1.25M AGI research and development grants, highlighting:
The SingularityNET Ambassador Program is a community-driven initiative that strengthens the transparency and decentralization of our ecosystem, recognizes the valuable contributions made by our Ambassadors, and rewards their achievements.
In October, our Ambassadors actively contributed to the SingularityNET ecosystem in the following ways:
To learn more about these recent developments, explore the Archives or watch the recordings of the SingularityNET Ambassador Program’s October Town Hall meetings on YouTube:
If you are interested in getting involved and joining our community-driven guilds and workgroups, please join our Discord server and navigate to the How to Join section for guidance.
BGI Nexus has emerged as a significant initiative under the BGI Collective, marking an important advancement in our collaborative efforts to shape ethical AI development.
Supported by leading organizations including SingularityNET and Humanity+, this initiative represents a coordinated approach to harnessing collective intelligence to shape the ethical frameworks and governance structures necessary for the responsible development of AI and beneficial AGI.
BGI Nexus exemplifies our commitment to fostering ethical AI development and ensuring that AI technologies evolve in alignment with universal ethical principles, safeguarding our dignity, rights, and our world. This launch marks a significant milestone, establishing a structured approach to guiding AGI development for the greater good of humanity and other sentient beings.
BGI Nexus announced the launch of the first collective engagement activity, the BGI Book Club.
The new BGI book club will be an engaging environment where participants can dive into rich discussions, share insights, and explore a variety of thought-provoking books related to AI ethics, AGI, the Singularity, governance, the nature of consciousness, and beyond.
Register now to join Dr. Ben Goertzel and Dr. Gabriel Axel Montes every other Wednesday to explore the first book in the series, The Consciousness Explosion.
SingularityDAO is a decentralized portfolio management protocol designed to revolutionize crypto asset management.
NuNet is building a globally decentralized computing framework, individually rewarded via a tokenomic ecosystem based on NuNet Utility Token (NTX).
Decentralizing the audio for real-time industries. Building the world’s first audio-specific DePIN, enabling super-fast and easily scalable audio connection for communication with AI agents and real-time industries such as music, entertainment, or gaming.
Rejuve.AI is a decentralized, AI-driven longevity research network allowing people worldwide to track their health data, receive valuable insights, contribute to cutting-edge longevity research, and earn RJV rewards.
Rejuve Biotech focuses on identifying new targets and pathways for therapies that could mitigate age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and cancer through advanced AI, cross-organism insights, and cutting-edge multi-omics research.
SingularityNET, as a global leader in the fields of AI, AGI, social robotics, and the intersection of AI and blockchain technology, is regularly sought out to provide thought leadership on a global stage.
In the past month, our team participated in the following key events:
Dr. Ben Goertzel delivered a keynote at the Decentralized Knowledge Graph Conference held by our partner OriginTrail to discuss the combined values of LLMs and Knowledge Graphs and how they fit into the past and future of AI.
Dr. Goertzel began by tracing the evolution of the AI field from its origins in the late 1950s, noting the foundational influence of Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book “Cybernetics” which established principles for neural networks and cognitive algorithms in both biological and engineered systems. He highlighted that since AI’s inception, two main approaches have coexisted: subsymbolic AI (neural networks) composed of tiny components without clear comprehensible semantics where meaning emerges from learned combinations, and symbolic AI which emerged in the mid-1960s, built with elements having clear semantic meaning, such as explicit representations using nodes and connections. The distinction, he explained, reflects both biological reality (neural networks resembling brain function) and human cognitive advancement through abstract symbol systems like science, language, and mathematics.
The current AI landscape, as described by Dr. Goertzel, shows remarkable progress in subsymbolic AI, particularly with Transformer Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks achieving unprecedented success through increased computational power and data availability. However, he pointed out significant limitations in current neural systems, including difficulties in distinguishing imagination from reality, limited creativity beyond surface-level pattern combinations, and the inability to make fundamental leaps beyond their training data. He illustrated this limitation by noting that a transformer neural net trained on music up to 1900 could never invent new genres like neoclassical metal or progressive jazz, instead only combining surface-level patterns from its training data.
Looking toward the future, Dr. Goertzel suggested we are potentially just two to seven years away from achieving AGI, a term he popularized in the early 2000s. The path forward, he argued, lies in combining symbolic and subsymbolic approaches. This includes augmenting deep neural networks with logical reasoning capabilities, implementing Knowledge Graphs alongside deep neural networks, and developing more fundamental creative generation algorithms. He emphasized that Knowledge Graphs represent the most scalable and flexible approach to representing symbolic knowledge, making them crucial for bridging the gap between symbolic and subsymbolic systems. The next breakthrough, he predicted, will come from integrating these approaches rather than simply scaling up existing transformer models.
Dr. Goertzel concluded by addressing the broader implications of AI development, highlighting the importance of developing AGI in a decentralized, beneficial, and ethical way. He warned against allowing a small elite group to control AGI development, advocating instead for a decentralized infrastructure to benefit humanity and other sentient beings. This ethical consideration, he noted, is as crucial as the technical challenges in advancing toward AGI and, shortly after, ASI.
Our COO, Janet Adams, joined Hinza Asif, President of ASIA WEB3 ALLIANCE JAPAN, Yusuke Kaga, Startup Supporter at JETRO, Eran Elhanani, Founder of BullPerks, and Colin Fitzpatrick, Chief Business Development Officer at GriffinAI, at the Cardano Summit 2024 to showcase SingularityNET’s and Cardano’s groundbreaking strategies and vision to lead the integration of blockchain technology with artificial intelligence.
During the panel, Janet highlighted our pioneering role in combining AI and blockchain technology, articulating our mission of creating a decentralized, democratic, inclusive, and beneficial AGI: “We launched in 2017 with a great mission to free humanity from the inequalities and the power structures that persist today by creating AGI and ASI on blockchain—decentralized, open source, and accessible to everyone worldwide so that the whole world can benefit from this AI revolution.”
Janet detailed several key collaborations and initiatives to showcase our commitment to open decentralized AI and AGI development, including our recent token mergers with decentralized AI industry leaders Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and CUDOS to create the largest open-source, independent player in AI research and development. She also discussed the $1.25M in AGI research and development grants we are offering to advance decentralized beneficial and benevolent AGI via our OpenCog Hyperon architecture. Additionally, Janet noted our collaboration with Project Catalyst to fund the development of a Cardano-based MultiParty Escrow (MPE) system enabling secure, on-chain payments and flexible payment channels for AI service transactions.
Janet also introduced our novel AIRIS (Autonomous Intelligent Reinforcement Inferred Symbolism) experiential learning system as a promising alternative to contemporary Reinforcement Learning techniques, highlighting how it not only optimizes energy efficiency and reduces ecological footprints by increasing the data efficiency of learning goal-directed behaviors but also outperforms Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in several different environments. Most notably, when tested against the MNIST (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology) database, AIRIS had a consistent accuracy of 97% on the second run of the “Test” set, markedly outperforming traditional CNNs, which typically require hundreds of runs to achieve comparable accuracy levels.
For those interested in exploring the complete discussion and gaining deeper insights into Cardano’s integration of AI and blockchain technology, the full panel session can be accessed through the official Cardano Foundation YouTube channel.
Our CEO, Dr. Ben Goertzel, and Angelica Nefertiti Strong, Director and Producer of the Beyond The Code AI immersive documentary, joined Grammy Award-winning musician and Adjunct Professor Macy Gray, who co-teaches the course ‘The Business of Music’ with Professor Jason D’Mello, at the Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Together, they discussed the future of music production and consumption, exploring the opportunities and possibilities that AI technology offers to artists and the music industry. During the event, students and attendees also had the chance to meet and interact with Desdemona Robot, the lead singer of Desdemona’s Dream band.
Our CTO, Sergey Shalyapin, took the Uminers stage at the Blockchain Life Forum 2024 in Dubai to explore the intersection of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence alongside Vladislav Martynov, General Partner of BR Capital, Kostas Chalkias, Co-Founder of Mysten Labs, Tiago Henriques, Head of AI/ML Technology Practice at Google Cloud EMEA, Jerry Z, Co-Founder of Delysium, and Greg Osuri, Founder of Akash Network.
During the panel, Sergey discussed the key challenges and opportunities in bringing AI into blockchain technology, noting that while blockchain has successfully evolved to manage micro-level transactions with high throughput, the rapid advancement of AI architectures presents novel integration challenges.
A key focus was the fundamental shift in AI computational demands. Sergey contrasted “elementary downstream task solvers”, which performed relatively simple inference tasks, with today’s monolithic transformer-based architectures that have raised demand to compute demonstrating more general communication skills and, most importantly, with upcoming AGI-class systems that compose multiple AI paradigms. These modern systems combine layers of memory, dynamic workloads, and hybrid neural-symbolic processing — creating workload patterns far more complex than traditional blockchain systems were originally designed to accommodate.
Beyond the technical integration challenges, Sergey outlined SingularityNET’s paradigm-shifting vision for AI-blockchain synergy. Rather than maintaining a narrow focus on blockchain’s traditional role in raw data management, he called for a transition toward a knowledge-centric architecture. This approach centers on the development of blockchain-powered Knowledge Layers, which he positioned as crucial facilitators in the evolution from current data-driven AI systems toward future knowledge-driven AGI.
The concept of Knowledge Layers, as presented by Sergey, represents a sophisticated approach to storing and managing distilled knowledge — highly refined, contextual information extracted from raw data through advanced processing methods. He explained how providing AI systems with access to this pre-processed, structured knowledge enables them to execute complex reasoning tasks more efficiently compared to working with raw data alone. This approach proves particularly valuable for modern AI systems that combine multiple reasoning mechanisms and require rich, contextual information.
For those interested in watching the complete panel discussion and gaining deeper insights into the convergence of AI and blockchain technology, the full session recording is available on the Blockchain Life official YouTube channel.
On the Kucoin stage, our Head of Blockchain Development, Albina Pomogalova, sat down with Nisheta Sachdev, CMO of Legion Ventures, Antonio Senatore, CTO of our partner VeChain, and Matt Gubriel, Head of BD at RedStone Oracles, to explore the evolution of Web3 development processes.
Our Strategic Initiatives Officier, Alex Blagirev, took the stage at M360 APAC in Seoul, South Korea, to highlight the transformative potential of AI across enterprise, employee, and consumer domains to leaders from the global mobile ecosystem, adjacent industries, and policymakers.
During his keynote address, Alex discussed readiness for unprecedented digital disruption across all enterprise-level environments, highlighting how SingularityNET, the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, and our ecosystem partners provide the technology and expertise to meet the needs of enterprise clients at any point on their journey to AGI readiness using a highly personalized knowledge layer.
Alex also focused on how organizations can harness AI to drive growth, enhance efficiency, and maintain a competitive edge in the digital age. He explained how Hyperon-based AGI-ready business solutions will open up new business opportunities and help enterprises continue adding value to customers over the coming years.
Joseph Beverley, Value Engineer at SingularityNET, represented the Foundation at the AI and Human Connection Salon co-hosted by Harvard and Preston-Werner Ventures in San Francisco. The event gathered leaders from tech, academia, and investment circles to explore the transformative potential of AI companions and how AI might shape or disrupt human relationships and well-being. With special representation from Google, Meta, Harvard, OpenAI, Character.AI, and the Vatican – amongst other recognizable thought leaders in AI and Ethics.
The discussions covered several thought-provoking themes, including the role of AI in social connection, the risks of substituting human interaction with AI, and the need for ethical considerations in developing technology for social good. These discussions were split into the following panels: AI and Human Connection, Tech and Social Life, AI Human Interfaces and the Good Life, Building Tech for Social Connectedness, and Investing in Tools for Social Connection.
One of the main takeaways from the events, which should be echoed across the AI industry is the imperative to avoid engagement-based revenue models. This stance is informed by two decades of social media history, where ‘free’ platforms operated on a two-step model of incentivizing psychological triggers and monetizing resulting user engagement. This model, while commercially successful, has produced concerning outcomes, including the degradation of authentic human interactions, increased social isolation, and the creation of negative psychological externalities.
The main mitigant was the supply of engaging media, created by individuals and organizations, in the case of AI, the need for this supply would be irrelevant with users capable of generating personalized media from images using stable diffusion and text generation with LLMs. Reflecting on this potential and the anti-social externalities made manifest with social media, it’s incumbent on the AI industry to avoid revenue models that exploit human vulnerabilities, ensuring that AI serves us in healthy, constructive ways.
While the mention of new commercial models needs further exploration and collaboration across academia, builders, and corporate entities, the potential of AI to ‘enhance’ human connection rather than ‘replace’ or ‘substitute’ human connection is most important. Adding to these ‘enhancements’ to human connection we discussed how AI can benefit those facing severe isolation but might risk detaching individuals with strong social skills from real human interactions. Questions like, “Is AI the best use of our time?” remind us that this technology must be used thoughtfully.
These insights touched on the importance of aligning AI systems with human values like empathy and compassion and implementing “human flourishing” principles from the start, following the impressive work pursued by the Human Flourishing Research team at Harvard and Humanity2.0, which SingularityNET is an active partner in.
The intersection of AI and social well-being presents fertile ground for research and development, with potential partnerships promising to advance our understanding of how artificial intelligence can contribute to human flourishing.
We were proud to attend the Namhae International ESG Arts Festival and Forum in South Korea, where our Strategic Initiatives Officer, Alex Blagirev, engaged with local and international policymakers and practitioners. The discussions focused on the fundamental importance of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles, their impact on regional economic development, and the examination of successful ESG implementations across various countries and regions.
During his intervention, Alex introduced our Knowledge Layer for Smart Buildings, which employs a Metagraph (graph of graphs) to enable advanced querying and analysis of building information. This innovative approach aims to establish a comprehensive Knowledge Graph of materials throughout the construction industry, ensuring transparent and trustworthy data provenance while potentially enabling generative building design.
Alex also discussed our strategic partnership with AL’MA Action Logement, highlighting our collaborative efforts to address the sustainable affordable housing challenge. By integrating artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and tokenization frameworks within the construction and real estate industry, we are developing innovative solutions to pressing challenges. A key focus of this initiative is addressing the construction sector’s significant contribution to European greenhouse gas emissions, positioning our partnership to drive meaningful transformation in industry practices.
We are fortunate to have some great community leaders who actively contribute to the growth and development of the SingularityNET ecosystem. Here are some of the latest community-created initiatives that showcase the creativity and collaborative spirit thriving within our ecosystem:
Join our vibrant community to dive deeper into the world of SingularityNET and discover how you can participate in shaping a more decentralized and democratized AI future. Connect with us on Discord and explore our Ambassador Program for opportunities to collaborate, learn, and contribute to our shared vision.
Recent media coverage highlights the progress we are making, the partnerships we are forging, and the thought leadership we are providing in the AI space:
We are proud of the work our teams and community accomplished in October, and we remain committed to continuing to lead the way in decentralized AI and the quest for beneficial AGI.
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