SingularityNET is betting on a network of powerful supercomputers to get us to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with the first one set to whir into action this September.
While today’s AI excels in specific areas – think GPT-4 composing poetry or DeepMind’s AlphaFold predicting protein structures – it’s still miles away from genuine human-like intelligence.
“While the novel neural-symbolic AI approaches developed by the SingularityNET AI team decrease the need for data, processing and energy somewhat relative to standard deep neural nets, we still need significant supercomputing facilities,” SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel explained to LiveScience in a recent written statement.
Enter SingularityNET’s ambitious plan: a “multi-level cognitive computing network” designed to host and train the incredibly complex AI architectures required for AGI. Imagine deep neural networks that mimic the human brain, vast language models (LLMs) trained on colossal datasets, and systems that seamlessly weave together human behaviours like speech and movement with multimedia outputs.
But this level of sophistication doesn’t come cheap. The first supercomputer, slated for completion by early 2025, will be a Frankensteinian beast of cutting-edge hardware: Nvidia GPUs, AMD processors, Tenstorrent server racks – you name it, it’s in there.
This, Goertzel believes, is more than just a technological leap, it’s a philosophical one: “Before our eyes, a paradigmatic shift is taking place towards continuous learning, seamless generalisation, and reflexive AI self-modification.”
To manage this distributed network and its precious data, SingularityNET has developed OpenCog Hyperon, an open-source software framework specifically designed for AI systems. Think of it as the conductor trying to make sense of a symphony played across multiple concert halls.
But SingularityNET isn’t keeping all this brainpower to itself. Reminiscent of arcade tokens, users will purchase access to the supercomputer network with the AGIX token on blockchains like Ethereum and Cardano and contribute data to the collective pool—fuelling further AGI development.
With experts like DeepMind’s Shane Legg predicting human-level AI by 2028, the race is on. Only time will tell if this global network of silicon brains will birth the next great leap in artificial intelligence.
(Photo by Anshita Nair)
See also: The merging of AI and blockchain was inevitable – but what will it mean?
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