Artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming some of the most in demand technologies. However, they are mostly controlled by large corporations, which develop their own kept in-house proprietary AI systems and software. A decentralized blockchain-based AI marketplace, initiated by Switzerland-based startup SingularityNET, aims to solve this issue.

The SingularityNET team wants to open the AI market to the entire world. It will enable individuals, developers, small companies and organizations to buy and sell AI services and machine learning tools easily. SingularityNET Foundation operates on a belief that the benefits of AI should not be dominated by any small set of powerful institutions, but shared by all.

The SingularityNET ICO (initial coin offering) attracted overwhelming interest and was hugely oversubscribed: 20,000 investors registered to participate and showed interest to buy $361 mln worth of tokens. All applicants were carefully screened to comply with global KYC/AML regulations, after which the pool of potential contributors was reduced to 5,000. Once the ICO started on December 21, 2017, the whole amount of AGI tokens worth 36 million USD was sold lightning fast – in less than 60 seconds.

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) tokens will act as fuel of SingularityNET ecosystem. AGI tokens will let anyone buy and sell AI/machine learning services from around the world via

SingularityNET marketplace. Whenever someone wants an agent to perform services, a smart contract will be signed for that specific job. Also AGI tokens will be used as one of the components in making decisions on how the network is governed in a decentralized way.

“We will invite developers from around the world to insert their AI code into the SingularityNET, to monetize their work and to contribute to the emerging AGI global brain. We will invite users of AI-as-a-service to choose SingularityNET as an alternative to big, corporate AI. This is the start of the decentralized AGI revolution!” said Dr. Ben Goertzel, founder and CEO of SingularityNET.

Earlier, a similar Singapore-based project ATN started IEO (initial exchange offering).