Dear Singularitarian,

AI researchers at Google recently resigned in protest to call for an end to the autonomous weapons project that Google had started. Project Maven kicked off in April 2017 and has now led to an ill-timed identity crisis for the company. Across the world, big tech is hemorrhaging talent and bleeding very publicly. Akin to the good ol’ days of Big Tobacco, lawmakers and civil society groups are pushing back but it remains to be seen if well-crafted messaging campaigns and apologia tours can continue to fool them.

What does this have to do with us?

Everything.

We believe that AI is too potent and powerful a technology to be firewalled by large centralized data monopolies. “Unintended Consequences” is not a phrase we want to recount to our grandchildren when they ask, “What went wrong?”.

A decentralized AI built by our team of talented engineers and developers is what we promised in our whitepaper . This update is the beginning of a series of newsletters where we’ll continue to share our milestones in furthering this vision and achieving our objectives and we will count on you, our community to help us co-create this future together.

Here’s the TL;DR version

Leading with Tech

The Alpha has been redesigned to serve as a foundation for a scalable SingularityNET. In the past weeks we have pushed out code in batches and will continue to do so leading up to the Beta. We invite early adopters to have a look at our code repositories on Github and we highlight 6 of these repositories here.

Wiki

Our wiki is the starting point for finding information to get started with the SingularityNET Alpha.

CLI

Use the SingularityNET CLI to interact with SingularityNET blockchain contracts and deployed services.

Alpha Blockchain

The Alpha Blockchain repo contains the smart contracts for running Agents and Services on the SingularityNET open network.

Alpha Daemon

The alpha implementation of SingularityNET daemon for hosting AI services on the SingularityNET decentralized network.

Alpha Service Example

This is an image classification service for use with the alpha implementation of the SingularityNET daemon. This example captures how a service will be exposed to the network.

Alpha DApp

The SingularityNET Alpha DApp lets you interact with Agents registered on the Kovan network using the testnet AGI.

Seeding the Network

We are currently working on several Go-to-Market applications to seed the network and to secure AI service partners. We are focusing our efforts in the domains of social media analytics, network analytics, biomedical analytics in conjunction with Shivom and Mozi AI , agricultural analytics, social robotics in partnership with Hanson Robotics (presently being used experimentally with the Sophia robot), semantic image captioning and more.

The core AI technology behind Sophia will be accessible to all roboticists and engineers on SingularityNET, making SingularityNET the leader in social robotics services. All of these services are in use as prototypes today. Externally, we have received commitments from several of our partners to list their AI services on our network to support our market entry into China.

AI Research Lab

The AI Research Lab will give you insider access to the most exciting AI initiatives we have under development. We have already published some articles from our researchers, such as:

The AI Research Lab will be focussing on a number of research domains, such as:

OpenCog technology for powering robots like Sophia.

Semantic perception to explore neural-symbolic learning.

OfferNets which is a research program at SingularityNET that aims to research alternatives to currency-based exchanges.

Simulation models of the dynamics of a large and complex SingularityNET.

Reputation systems to develop a new consensus framework for AI service provider reputation, our so-called Proof of Reputation.

Grammar learning where OpenCog-based information-theoretic symbolic inference is combined with neural net based learning in various unique ways.

Diagnosis and understanding of crop diseases for better agriculture.

Longevity data analysis to discover the combinations of genetic variations for people who lived more than 110 years in order to better understand those variations and the roles they play in biological processes and different cellular components.

Meta-learning for inference control as probabilistic meta-learning is a key AGI component, ultimately leading to a system that can self-optimize its behavior.

Business

Expansion

We are moving the business forward by expanding to China and Korea. We have secured a space in Hong Kong’s East Tsim Sha Tsui district, which will serve as SingularityNET’s head office and as the central physical meeting-point for our globally distributed team. Move-in is expected for early July. Additionally, in line with our push to expand our Asian presence, we have established a partnership with Seoul National University (one of Korea’s most prestigious and powerful educational and research institutions) and opened a modest office in Seoul, to be staffed as the year progresses and lead by Dr. Youngsook Park (Head of Millennium Project Korea).

Strategic Partnerships

SingularityNET and AI Decentralized announced the Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA) on the 22nd of May 2018. DAIA is an open industry alliance that will foster the development of decentralized AI technologies. DAIA’s number one goal is to provide a way for those in the field of AI and blockchain to stay coordinated and connected, increasing the odds that the democratic, decentralized software ecosystem plays a dominant role in the ongoing rise of AI. Read and talk more about DAIA here .

We have established core partnerships with several major projects that share our vision to decentralize and democratize AI technology. We will be announcing some of these new partnerships this month.

Team

The SingularityNET team has grown fast and has more than 70 employees working full-time on making this vision a reality. You can view our team members on our team page .

Hiring

We expect to increase our team size substantially in the next 12 months across all functions from tech to business development and marketing. Immediate positions in business development and marketing are open in our offices in Hong Kong, China and New York . Please reach out to Arif Khan, our VP of Marketing, at arif@singularitynet.io to express your interest. Job descriptions will be published shortly on our Community Forum.

Upcoming Events

If you would like to meet us in-person please register on the SingularityNET Community Forum to get an alert when we post it on the bulletin. Some of the upcoming events we will be present at are the ICT Expo Ethiopia, RISE, Humanity+ and Human Level AI 2018.

If you missed the in-person events, you can always join the community chat to catch-up, where we post and discuss videos like these below:

Thank you for your continued support.

To the Singularity and beyond,

Dr. Ben Goertzel

and the SingularityNET Team

This is a newsletter sent out to our mailinglist to which you can subscribe on our homepage at singularitynet.io.