Leaders from the AI and Blockchain Worlds Converge in Panama City to Architect an Alternate, Decentralized Path to AGI and Superintelligence

Press Release

• The Beneficial AGI Summit and Unconference (BGI-24), hosted by SingularityNET and its partner companies TrueAGI and HyperCycle, kicked into gear yesterday in Panama City with opening statements from Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and George Gilder, Co-Founder of Discovery Institute.
• Talks and panels are being live-streamed and there are online discussion forums and working groups for remote participants as well.
• A key focus of the event is bringing together relevant experts to answer the question: How might a decentralized ecosystem leveraging open source and blockchain viably beat Big Tech to the goal of creating beneficial AGI?
• Over the four days of the event, thought and action leaders will delve into a wide range of topics related to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – including decentralized governance systems for emerging AGI networks and the nature of life after AGI and superintelligence.

Given the recent rapid advances in the AI field, an increasing number of experts are foreseeing a breakthrough to full human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) within as little as three to 10 years. This raises a great number of questions, including which particular AI technologies will play the biggest role in this epochal achievement but also: Who will own and control the AGI once it arrives?   Currently, Big Tech is playing a driving role in AI progress, coupled with a key role in open science and open-source software. Governments are becoming acutely interested in proposals for AI regulation, albeit mainly short on details of what these would contain.

Contra the pro-regulation camp, Marc Andreesen and other Silicon Valley luminaries have come forward with an “e/acc” or “Effective Accelerationist” approach, arguing that the best path forward for humanity will be to move rapidly toward AGI which will then be able to better resolve the various issues we face.

SingularityNET Foundation and the organizers of the BGI-24 event represent the related but distinct “d/acc” perspective – defined by the intuition that the best route to a positive outcome for humanity is to accelerate progress toward AGI rather than slowing it down with restrictive regulations, but that this acceleration should be coupled with decentralized control to avoid pathologies of autocratic or oligopolistic control, and careful defensive consideration of practical risks as they arise.

Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output Global (IOHK) and founder of leading blockchain network Cardano, joined SingularityNET’s AI Alchemist Dr. Mihaela Ulieru for a fireside chat ahead of the event, noting that “These models will eventually get to a scale in point where one of them (...) is going to escape, so the question is does it have embedded within it some values that would make it compatible with us or at the very least non- adversarial with us."

To mitigate this risk, Mr. Hoskinson advocates for a decentralized approach to AI development "Decentralization is nice because you get a mixture of opinions and then all that alignment gets counterbalanced by other opinions and you can at least get a diversity of thought inside a system instead of a thinking monoculture."

In his opening keynote, the Father of AGI and SingularityNET CEO Dr. Ben Goertzel, who coined and popularized the term “AGI” in 2005, argued that we are likely less than a decade from achieving human-level AGI, and that superintelligence will likely emerge at most a few years thereafter.  He believes that Large Language Models (LLMs) and other deep neural nets will be only part of the machinery via which AGI is achieved. Other historically important AI paradigms like logical reasoning and evolutionary learning will also play a role and will outline the cross-paradigm OpenCog Hyperon system his AGI research and development teams at SingularityNET, TrueAGI, and Zarqa are developing alongside the wider OpenCog community.   

Dr. Goertzel has also highlighted the critical importance of deploying AGI systems like Hyperon on decentralized, democratically-governed, secure-by-design blockchain-based infrastructure, to avoid scenarios where a small number of companies or government agencies have excessive control over the future of humanity.

Further emphasizing the themes of Dr. Goertzel’s keynote, the BGI-24 event featured the release of two technical whitepapers titled ‘SingularityNET’s Progress Towards Beneficial General Intelligence (BGI)’ and ‘SingularityNET AI Platform 2024 Roadmap’.   

Conference participants have also been invited to review a pre-publication draft of Dr. Goertzel’s forthcoming book “The Consciousness Explosion” which will be released in April and treats the broader themes covered in the BGI-24 event.

The Summit will conclude with a performance from Desdemona, the robotic musician created by David Hanson and Ben Goertzel, and Desdemona’s Dream band, perfectly highlighting the technology discussed at the event.

“We are thrilled to join Dr. Goertzel and other AI thought leaders at the Beneficial AGI Summit and Unconference in Panama,” said Logan Ryan Golema, CEO, SophiaVerse and Sentience. “Enabling important discussions on the power of AI-enabled sentience, this event is fully aligned with our team’s vision to merge the vast potential of decentralized AI and apps – empowering users to interact with digital assets and virtual environments in new ways.”

As the BGI-24 event continues, attendees are still able to register for the online portion of the event. Free tickets are available here: https://bgi24.ai/

About SingularityNET 

SingularityNET is the world’s leading decentralized AI Platform and hosts a fully-fledged AI ecosystem with a rich community all working toward the global distribution of AI. It is the first and only decentralized platform allowing AIs to cooperate and coordinate at scale while enabling everyone to take advantage of a global network of AI algorithms, services, and agents. No longer must AI technology exist in silos, only capable of operating within a specific company, infrastructure, or industry.