SingularityNET creating marketplace of modular AI services

Nextbigfuture interviewed Mitchell Loureiro of SingularityNET. Mitchell Loureiro is the Marketing Lead of SingularityNET. Mitchell has a proven track record in building business strategies and exposure for next generation technologies. He is the VP of Marketing at Steemit, and a blockchain specialist at rLoop.

Experts estimate that AI market will increase from the $200 billion it is valued today to $3.1 trillion by 2025, but serious roadblocks remain. Today, AI functionality is expensive, time-consuming, and hard to use.

SingularityNET is a protocol for coordinating and transacting AI services.

Currently AI is a decentralized market. The SingularityNET protocol enables a global AI marketplace. As it matures, it will contribute to a decentralized, market-based artificial general intelligence for the benefit of all. Learn more about the project with the documents below.

SingularityNET will enable algorithms to be purchased as automated services.

AI service marketplace would make the task of creating Sophia level AI far easier

Sophia the robot is a case of an AI. She is the most advanced robot of her kind made up of dozens of algorithms. All algorithms are coordinated. It took 30-40 different AI developers to create Sophia.

Sophia uses dozens of algorithms, many of which are licensed from third parties. Today, integrating extern AI resources and functionality is slow, costly, and simply too difficult for most organizations. AI developers, including the hundreds that we work with, are demanding better ways to acces and integrate AI technologies. SingularityNET is designed to meet that demand, providing the only protocol for AI to AI communication, transaction, and market discovery.

Soon, Sophia’s entire mind will live on the network, letting her learn from every other AI in the SingularityNET. And the whole world will be able to talk to her.

Protocols and Interfaces to enable AI modules to work together

If there were protocols and standardized interactions then AI services could be added via a plug and play model. This would be like internet services or programming objects.

If the standards interfaces were created and adopted then the barrier to entry in Artificial intelligence would drop.

AI services would become modules.

Standardize the data passing.
Inside processing remains hidden.

Image recognition modules could be combined with risk analysis.

Many standard components could be used and an AI developer or smaller team of AI developers would only focus on improving one module.

Whitepaper

There are several aspects to this
* Language for the APIs.
* Reputation system on the blockchain. This would help provide feedback on quality of processing and honesty, verification of completion. Arbitor of truth.
* Create a settlement layer using tokens

There can also be a staking mechanism. Voting with their cash.

There is a 51 page whitepaper. SingularityNET: A decentralized, open market and inter-network for AIs, Ben Goertzel, Simone Giacomelli, David Hanson, Cassio Pennachin, Marco Argentieri and the SingularityNET team, November 16, 2017

The value and power of Artificial Intelligence is growing dramatically every year, and will soon dominate the internet – and the economy as a whole. However, AI tools today are fragmented by a closed development environment; most are developed by one company to perform one task, and there is no way to plug two tools together. SingularityNET aims to become the key protocol for networking AI and machine learning tools to form a coordinated Artificial General Intelligence.

SingularityNET is an open-source protocol and collection of smart contracts for a decentralized market of coordinated AI services. Within this framework, the benefits of AI become a global commons infrastructure for the benefit of all; anyone can access AI tech or become a stakeholder in its development. Anyone can add an AI/machine learning service to SingularityNET for use by the network, and receive network payment tokens in exchange.

SingularityNET is backed by the SingularityNET Foundation, which operates on a belief that the benefits of AI should not be dominated by any small set of powerful institutions, but shared by all. A key goal of SingularityNET is to ensure the technology is benevolent according to human standards, and the network is designed to incentivize and reward beneficial players.

SingularityNET is essentially a distributed computing architecture for making new kinds of smart contracts to facilitate market interactions with AI and machine learning tools. The following design principles are incorporated throughout the design:
• Interoperability: The network will be able to interface with multiple blockchains.
• Data Sovereignty and Privacy: User data control and sharing comes with privacy-enabled controls on top of the network, and access is validated through smart contracts and the blockchain.
• Modularity: Flexible network capabilities make it possible to create custom topologies, AI Agent collaboration arrangements, and failure recovery methods.
• Scalability: SingularityNET will securely host both private and public contracts, so more scalable and resilient applications can be built on top of it with near zero transaction costs.

SingularityNET Agents can run in the cloud, on phones, robots, or other embedded devices. Via close collaboration with co-founding firm Hanson Robotics, SingularityNET is designed to foster the development of multiple species of robots as the next-generation interface for delivering AI services and applications, and fostering the emergence of global Artificial General Intelligence.

At its foundation, SingularityNET is a set of smart contract templates which AI Agents can use to request AI work to be done, to exchange data, and to supply the results of AI work. These also include contracts to be used by external, non-AI Agents who wish to obtain AI services from AI Agents in the network.

Anyone can create a node (an AI Agent) and put it online (running on a server, home computer or embedded device) and enter this node into the network, so that it can request and/or fulfill AI tasks in interaction with other nodes, and engage in economic transactions.

SingularityNET can be accessed through its own token, the AGI token. Token holders can participate in the DSOC’s democratic governance process, and they can also purchase services in the marketplace.

SingularityNET is a radically innovative economic mechanism, designed to catalyze human and machine intelligence toward a new form of ethically beneficial self-organizing intelligence. The SingularityNET of AI Agents is designed to provide valuable AI services to customers across the Internet, while, in the process, self-organizing toward its lofty goals. A highly successful SingularityNET may very plausibly play a major role in the transition of humanity toward a positive Technological Singularity.

The key types of service exchange in SingularityNET are:
• Exchange of software or hardware services for other software or hardware services;
• Exchange of software or hardware services for SingularityNET’s ns, aka AGI tokens;
• Matchmaking to determine favorable combinations of exchanges among Agents;
• Requesting, or providing, a vote on a specific governance issue.

To make the first two types of transactions listed as simple as possible, a set of standard AI software and hardware service APIs will be provided for incorporation into smart contract templates; and a number of templates embodying these tools will be provided for utilization. A few examples of services covered by these APIs would be:
• Image and video processing services, like finding out what people are in a video, or producing a text description of an image;
• Language processing services like text summarization, machine translation or text sentiment analysis;
• Providing datasets as background knowledge to train AIs in doing data analysis of other datasets;
• Requests to have some particular dataset analyzed;
• Exchanging processing time, or memory, for tokens.

Status and Competitors

Big 4 accounting firms do want to do it.

Full Singularitynet.io system will be running Q3 2018

Singularitynet.io has 50 AI developers
The team is in Hong Kong, Ethopia, Brazil. The Singularitnet.io executive team is in Hong kong.
They have 10 block chain developers
Will hire more block chain and AI developers.

AT and T is trying to make a centralized AI marketplace.
Major cloud service providers will likely launch AI marketplaces.

Singularitynet.io will let people own their own data and be a permissionless market.
Homomorphic encryption – so people own their own data. Unlike central marketplace.

Singularitynet.io will have a stronger market effect.

2018 – There should be a few hundred AI algorithms in the marketplace.