SingularityNET and AI Decentralized today announced the Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA), an open industry alliance trying to foster the development of decentralized AI technologies.

SingularityNET is best known for powering Sophia, the Hanson Robotics robot. It is also building a decentralized marketplace for AI around the globe. AI Decentralized, meanwhile, aims to connect AI practitioners with blockchain practitioners.

AIDA promises to bring together companies, foundations, and labs operating at the intersection of AI and blockchain technology. The alliance will provide a medium for member organizations to coordinate standards, protocols, interfaces, and other technical matters, along with organizing community events, providing networking opportunities, and giving legal and management guidance.

DAIA will also foster the creation of funds to support AI blockchain-powered projects. The initial DAIA plan involves an affiliated fund that will support 100 projects over the next two years, with funding allowances of $2 million for each of the first 50 projects.

“While I am a strong believer in altruism, I am a bigger believer in having an incentive for folks to contribute to something that has altruism at its core,” AI Decentralized founder Toufi Saliba said in a statement. “The altruism here is responsibility — a responsibility for the future of AI that we feel, and that we hope many more people will feel. This responsibility is about knowing that the AI we create today, and that will impact the world for the next 1000 years and beyond, may be oppressive, or it may be liberating. This is why we are creating mechanisms that will financially incentivize people to create AI that will be liberating and act for the greater good.”

Initial projects being considered include machine learning based cybersecurity solutions, AI-driven reputation management, and collaborative filtering tools specialized for decentralized networks, as well as logical inference engines for validating the properties of smart contracts.

Ultimately, DAIA hopes it will 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.

“To me, DAIA is more than just another industry organization,” Dr. Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET said in a statement. “It’s a movement — a movement by a network of adventurous technologists and entrepreneurs around the globe, aimed at wresting control of the world’s AI and the data and computing power that feeds it from the handful of big tech companies and big governments that are currently threatening dominance.”