Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchains are both hailed as revolutionary technologies that will change industries and human life forever, but rarely do we see the two mentioned together. At a glance, they seem to be compartmentalized, with AI focusing on complex problem solving and blockchain projects more geared toward financial applications. But some experts are beginning to see how the promises of decentralization offered by blockchain tech can be combined with power of AI. There are a small number of blockchain solutions dealing with AI, but the most ambitious one so far might be SingularityNET (AGI), a project which aims to not only harness the power of AI, but make it more democratic and accessible to ordinary people.

The Promise (and Problem) with AI

It is widely understood by now that AI can drastically improve efficiency and performance across many industries by bringing massive computational power to something that until recently, was sole the domain of humans: cognition. While many are excited about the possibilities of AI, it is not without its critics. Leaving aside fears of job elimination and Terminator-style takeovers for the moment, there is one thing most AI projects have in common that can be problematic: they are centrally-controlled.

When massive companies like IBM, Google and others build AI systems, they are doing it for their own benefit, which is to be expected — companies are in business to make money after all, and smart ones will invest in R & D so they can stay on the cutting edge of new technologies. But the systems they build are designed to help them with their problems, not necessarily those of ordinary people. This is a big part of what the team behind SingularityNET wanted to change.

The project is led by Dr. Ben Goertzel, one of the world’s leading experts on AI. Both Dr. Goertzel and the rest of the SingularityNET team are also working closely with Hanson Robotics (the creator of the famous robot Sophia) to use blockchain technology to radically change how AI solutions can be deployed.

In an interview with Tech Republic, Dr.Goertzel says that there are 3 main challenges with AI at this time:

1) While many AI solutions do specialized tasks very well, there is a lack of Artificial General Intelligence, or “AGI”.

2) AI is currently quite fragmented; each system kind of exists in its own world and there’s not really a way for them to communicate and work together easily.

3) AI systems are overwhelmingly built by and for huge tech companies or government/military applications. There are many other potential applications for AI which could benefit society, but are not being realized due to the “socioeconomic nature of the AI industry”.

The goal of SingularityNET is to address all three of these issues by building the world’s first decentralized AI-as-a-Service open marketplace, where users can search for and implement AI services on the network. In this way, ordinary people and smaller businesses can now benefit from AI solutions which might not ordinarily be accessible to them.

This in itself is a fascinating concept, but it’s really only scratching the surface. Using SingularityNET, AIs which are working on a task can actually find and work with other AIs to get a job done better and faster. Let’s say there is a particular part of a project that the AI you selected isn’t best suited to. That AI can essentially “subcontract” that part of the project out to another AI on the network to solve that problem.

All these different AIs may be better at some things than others, but by working together on this platform, they form what Dr.Goertzel refers to as a “meta AI”, essentially creating a sort of collective Artificial General Intelligence that has proven elusive so far. It’s only fitting then that “AGI” is the ticker for the native token on this new network.

SingularityNET (AGI) Token Performance & Upcoming Developments

AGI had one of the most successful ICOs in history, raising a staggering $36 million in only 60 seconds when it launched in December of 2017.

AGI reached an all-time high of $0.95 USD before suffering a steep decline after the bursting of the 2017 crypto bubble. Currently, AGI tokens are hovering between $0.04–0.05 USD. From an investment standpoint this may seem pretty alarming, but it is important to keep in mind that AI is still in its infancy; it’s very likely going to be a game-changing technology across many different industries. Both people and companies are not going to start taking advantage of it it until it is more widely understood and accessible, and SingularityNET has a coherent plan for solving that problem.

This is not investment advice, and we encourage you to do your research on every coin we showcase in our Coin of the Week series. We can only report on what we see when we look at a project. SingularityNET has a strong and devoted community around it that really believes in their idea, and the team has world-class credentials and a proven track record. We can’t predict the future, but if they deliver on their vision AGI could be a strong long-term hold.

The Best Way to Buy SingularityNET (AGI)

The simplest way to add AGI to your portfolio is with Faast. With our platform, you can instantly swap AGI and over 100 other cryptocurrencies directly from your own hardware or software wallet. There’s no need to create an account— just sync your wallet and you’re good to go.

SingularityNET is raising the bar for AI services, and we’re doing the same for easy, frictionless crypto trading.

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