Introducing the SingularityNET Whitepaper

Powering the future of the decentralized AI economy.

Nearly a year into development, SingularityNET is poised to revolutionize the way businesses, institutions, and individuals develop and utilize artificial intelligence. Led by an established team of developers and partners (previous projects include OpenCog, Hanson Robotics, and Novamente), we are proud to announce the publication of the SingularityNET whitepaper.

Update: The whitepaper linked above was updated on November 16th, 2017 to remove the decentralized mint function.

As with SingularityNET, where AIs cooperate for greater capabilities and outcomes, capturing the collective knowledge of our community will create massive value for the platform. We look forward to incorporating feedback from our users, as well as future developers and partners.

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AI is exploding, but there’s a major limiting factor

SingularityNET meets an acute and accelerating need in a projected $3.1 trillion market. In the current economic and technological context, every business needs AI, but off-the-shelf AIs will rarely match a business’s needs. Only tech giants can hire armies of developers to build custom AIs, and even they have a hard time hiring enough AI experts to meet demand.

Many state of the art AI tools exist only in GitHub repositories created by grad students or independent researchers. This puts them out of the reach of anyone without the skills to install, configure, and run them. Most AI developers are academics, not businesspeople, and have no easily-accessible marketplace to monetize their clever AI code.

“Today, nearly every AI resource and capability is stuck in a silo, relegated to a single industry or use-case.” — Ben Goertzel, SingulartyNET Founder & CEO

In addition to their clever code, machine learning tools require datasets of sufficient size. Creating and managing such large datasets is beyond the means and capabilities of most AI developers, and the closed development model that currently prevails makes it hard for developers to share datasets.

SingularityNET gives AI developers what they crave most

We have a situation similar to the ones that spawned the creation of Uber and AirBnB: there is a large unexploited resource, a large market in need of that resource. The unexploited resource is AI algorithms and software existing on GitHub and elsewhere, and the market in need of this resource is the 99% of businesses that can’t afford their own team of AI experts. SingularityNET is the tool that connects the two.

SingularityNET provides an automated process enabling each business to connect existing AI tools together to build the solution it needs. By providing an easy means of configuring tools, it offers both customization and availability, while reducing the reduplication of effort involved in proprietary development, making the development process more efficient.

SingularityNET launches these AI tools and datasets onto the marketplace, making them more accessible to end-users and developers, and giving developers a way to monetize their creations. It is a sharing-economy marketplace for AI, that encourages collaboration between these tools and decentralized sharing of information, democratizing access to the benefits of AI.

Example of a “circle of exchange: among AI agents. Three SingularityNET AI Agents are depicted, each one providing a certain AI service to another, and receiving an AI service from yet another. A ternary cycle such as this is just a simple illustrative case; in a real SingularityNET setting, the cycles and other patterns of dependency between different agents will be longer and more tangled.

Examples of (offer, request) pairs that AI Agents might make, offering to pay for services other nodes provide them. They might pay in tokens, or pay in kind with AI services. The node making the request does so either because a user has directly requested it, or because another AI Agent delegated the task to them. Mutual ful- fillment of these (offer, request) pairs leads to the circle of exchange depicted in the previous illustration.

In accordance with these goals, SingularityNET will be an open network. Anyone can insert an AI agent as long as the agent shares information accord- ing to the SingularityNET API, and accepts/disburses payment according to SingularityNET’s economic logic. New AI agents will come from AI software developers who want access to SingularityNET’s market, which will be the hub of open AI services.

High-level architecture diagram

Next Steps

We invite you to explore Why We Are Building SingularityNET and meet the team to understand our work thus far. Dive deeper by reading our whitepaper.

We have plenty in store for you. Next week, we’ll be detailing the biggest market applications of SingularityNET.

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