Dear Singularitarians,

A bout a week ago, Dr. Goertzel and Vitalik Buterin shared the same stage to discuss the future of AI and Blockchain. A significant part of the conversation centered around privacy.

Video: Panel discussion between Dr. Ben Goertzel and Vitalik Buterin.

As we move beyond the information age, our data is expected to become even more valuable. Companies continue to push against the boundaries of what we presently consider the private realm, and policymakers and blockchain communities have begun to push back on our behalf.

In Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes we detailed our thoughts around privacy and governance and laid out the reasons for educating our community to eventually move towards democratic self-governance. Last month, we took an important step toward decentralized democratic governance by creating the SingularityNET Supervisory Council.

As regulators all over the world try to deal with the ever-increasing rate of technological change and govern our complex adaptive systems with static and outdated tools, SingularityNET and Network Society Lab sought to guide and inform the regulatory outlook on AI by organizing the AI Thought leaders workshop during the Malta AI & Blockchain Summit.

Dr. Ben Goertzel delivered a keynote address during the Malta AI & Blockchain Summit.

Dr. Goertzel also published a pragmatic take on this issue by proposing that we augment human decision making with an AI-based sociopolitical support system. Coincidentally, our decision to launch a blockchain based AI startup accelerator to help startups received several promising applications looking to solve mission-critical issues like the ones we’ve mentioned above. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements in the month of June as we finalize our initial batch of accelerator projects.

Let’s dive in to cover our activities in the Month of May.

Technical Updates

As a snapshot indicator of our developer activity, we now have 78 Github repositories and 124,397 commits. You can track the progress of our dev work here.

Interview: How AI and Blockchain will shape the future

Here is an overview of what the team has been working on:

Our Javascript and Python SDK are available for use with the latest snet-cli release. The newly released SingularityNET Software Development Kit (SDK) offers a set of tools, libraries, and documentation that will assist AI developers to create and launch AI services on the SingularityNET Network. It will also facilitate end-users to integrate AI Services into their applications.

We created some client and server code examples for you in different programming languages. Please find the repository here.

We updated the SingularityNET Daemon. As a quick reminder, the SingularityNET Daemon exposes an AI application as an API that is accessible through the SingularityNET Network. It handles all interaction with the blockchain for authorization and payment using AGI tokens and passes through API calls to the AI application. It has now been expanded by enabling it to support streaming requests. This will allow a request or response to have an arbitrarily large size in order to enable the use of large payloads which are needed by several AI services. This will be particularly relevant to requests made by enterprise customers. Please find the repository here to check it out.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) cluster has been enhanced and it can now automatically recover from most types of node failures.

We introduced outdated deployment detection for daemons and clients.

We revamped all our snet client commands which you can find here.

Video: Dr. Ben Goertzel’s keynote address at Brain Bar 2019

Meetups and Workshops

After the Beta launch of our platform, we increased our efforts at hosting workshops and meetups to introduce the SingularityNET platform to others. In May, we hosted:

Workshop at Malta AI & Blockchain Summit

The AI Thought leaders workshop featured an introductory keynote address by Dr. Ben Goertzel and was heavily focused toward addressing and highlighting the regulatory, social, and legal aspects of AI.

Workshop at CryptoChicks Blockchain & AI Conference

Held in Toronto, this hands-on workshop detailed how to build on the SingularityNET platform - which provided its participants with a very practical and in-depth introduction to decentralized AI.

SingularityNET Supervisory Council

In May, we announced our plan to create the SingularityNET Supervisory Council.

The Supervisory Council will ensure that SingularityNET upholds its founding vision, values, and commitments as well as serve to foster quality interactions between our community members and the Foundation.

After a careful assessment of the applicants, the Foundation has shortlisted seven nominees for the SingularityNET Supervisory Council, and we are running an AMA session from the 6th of June right up till Election Day, which will take place on Wednesday the 12th of June 2019. In this historic first election within the SingularityNET ecosystem, our community members will be able to vote and select three individuals from the nominees to be elected as Council members.

Please feel free to ask our candidates any questions here: Candidate AMA

To learn more about the Supervisory Council, the seven nominees, and the voting process, please visit our community forum.

SingularityNET X-Lab

In May, we also announced the launch of SingularityNET X-Lab, a blockchain based AI startup accelerator.

The SingularityNET X-Lab will provide technical, financial, marketing, and management support to promising startups at the intersection of AI and blockchain. The registration form for the SingularityNET X-Lab is live, and we’re reviewing the applications on a rolling basis. We invite every startup looking to join the AI industry to begin their journey to democratize AI with us.

We look forward to listening to your ideas, discovering what you plan to build, and helping you achieve your goals. To learn more about the SingularityNET X-Lab and how it can help your startup, please click here.

Events

In May, members of our team represented SingularityNET at the following events:

13th - 15th May - Webit.Fesitval Europe - Dr. Ben Goertzel delivered a keynote address on the necessity of decentralized AI and participated in a panel discussion on the convergence of AI and blockchain with Jesus Mantas of IBM.

23rd - 24th May - Malta AI & Blockchain Summit 2019 - SingularityNET and Network Society Lab collaborated to host the AI Thought leaders workshop, and Dr. Ben Goertzel participated in a panel discussion on AGI and the technological singularity.

29th May - SAP Next-Gen New York Meetup - Our CMO Arif Khan discussed the future of decentralized AI and the vision of SingularityNET at the invitation of the SAP senior leader Ann Rosenberg.

30th - 31st May - Brain Bar event in Budapest, Hungary - Dr. Ben Goertzel delivered a keynote address on whether we can live forever as digital copies of ourselves!

31st May - 2nd June - CryptoChicks conference in Toronto - Dr. Ben Goertzel and Vitalik Buterin discussed the future of AI and Blockchain, our platform team held a developer workshop, and Dr. Ben Goertzel delivered a keynote speech on social robots and blockchain powered AI.

Video: Webit.Festical panel discussion on AI and Blockchain

Media Updates

As we represent SingularityNET across various events and create awareness about its capabilities and vision, the world is starting to notice us. Notable media mentions of SingularityNET for the month of May include:

Video: Dr. Ben Goertzel’s keynote address at the Webit.Festival Europe

Upcoming Events

June 7th - 9th - Future Frontiers in Austin, TX - Hrish Lotlikar our, Business Development Lead, will be speaking about what a fully immersive augmented & extended reality means for humanity.

June 10th - 12th - CogX 2019 London, GB - Several members of our team will be attending the Festival of AI and Emerging Technology.

June 20th - ConnecTechAsia in Singapore - Dr. Ben Goertzel will participate in a panel discussion on how to make blockchain mainstream.

July 16th - 18th - Maicon in Cleveland, Ohio - Arif Khan will be at the Marketing Intelligence conference representing SingularityNET.

That is it for this newsletter! Be sure to join our Telegram Channel and Community Forum, and follow us on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn!

Thank you for your continued support,

The SingularityNET Team