Announcing our AI collaboration with Ping An Technology

Investment, Innovation, Intelligence

Editor’s note: The logo above now reflects the Ping An Technology Group, as a subsidiary of the Ping An Group.

Ping An Technology and SingularityNET have reached the intention to collaborate in the field of Artificial Intelligence, possible future directions for collaboration include (but are not limited to) OCR and model training.

- Mr. Bai Meng, AI BD lead for Ping An Technology

We are proud and excited to announce our AI collaboration with Ping An, a Chinese holding conglomerate that ranked 1oth in the Forbes 2018 Global 2000.

Ping An is recognized as the world’s most valuable insurance brand, and with an impressive 170 million customers and 459 million internet users, it ranked as the third largest global financial services company in 2018.

Company Profile of Ping An — source

From its very beginning, Ping An has displayed a remarkable ability to adapt and innovate. Founded in 1988, the company has experienced YoY growth of 23.3% for its operating profits. In the past decade, Ping An has invested more than RMB 50 billion in technology development, gathered more than 23,000 R&D personnel, 500 big data experts, and established six research institutes.

Its fintech offshoot, Ping An Technology, is the leading player in China — placing ahead of its rival Hundsun Technologies, which is backed by Ant Financial. Ping An Technology has birthed tech unicorns such as the peer-to-peer lender Lufax (valued at $18 Billion), the healthcare portal with 30 million-plus monthly active users called Ping An Good Doctor, and a mobile app for booking hospital visits called the Ping An Healthcare And Technology, that is used by 800 million customers.

First Mover Advantage

The story of Ping An rhymes with that of SingularityNET.

One of the reasons behind Ping An’s rapid growth is how it utilized its first mover advantage in mobile apps to advance its market share in several industries: insurance, banking, financial services, healthcare, real estate and so on.

For companies that operate with a platform business model, being the first player in the market carries a clear economic advantage. Once a platform achieves a certain size, network effects kick in and competing with that platform becomes near impossible.

Last month, with the launch of the beta version of our platform, the world’s first decentralized AI marketplace emerged on the radar of the AI industry. SingularityNET’s first mover advantage has already begun to add to its competitiveness.

SingularityNET offers enterprises the ability to tap into a decentralized network of coordinating AI services shaped by the economic forces of an open and transparent market. With nation states such as the US considering export controls on AI, being reliant on a decentralized network for AI services is a smart hedge and carries clear advantages.

As more and more entities adopt SingularityNET either by offering their services on the platform, utilizing the services that already exist, or backing the creation of new services — the first mover advantage of SingularityNET will seal its place as the global mind cloud that is governed democratically and not controlled by any single entity.

The AI Collaboration

Talking about the AI collaboration with Ping An, Dr. Ben Goertzel remarked:

The scale of Ping An provides considerable opportunities to showcase the benefits of AI application. We are currently discussing how to integrate SingularityNET infrastructure with Ping An’s IT infrastructure in order to analyze the different types of data available. Generally speaking, successful AI applications require at least four ingredients — AI algorithms, data, computer power, and human understanding of the problem domain. Between SingularityNET and Ping An we have all four of these in abundance, and so I am confident we will be able to do great things together.

At the beginning of the collaboration, SingularityNET and Ping An will focus on three main areas: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Computer Vision(CV) and model training, where SingularityNET’s ecosystem could be applied for commercial purposes.

Ping An’s unstaffed clinics that use AI called “One Minute Clinic” are already operational in 8 cities of China.

The sheer scope and ambition of Ping An when it comes to AI — from the Ping An Smart City to the One Minute Clinic initiative of the Ping An Good Doctor — will allow SingularityNET and Ping An to collaborate across multiple industries and initiatives in the future. We are confident that our collaboration will amplify the reach and competitiveness of Ping An while increasing the diversity and richness of our decentralized network. Our successful collaboration will help guide other enterprises towards utilizing our platform and will be marked as an important milestone in the movement to democratize AI.

Join Us

SingularityNET plans to reinforce and expand its collaborations to shape the coming AI Singularity into a positive one, for all. To read more about our other partners, click here.

The best way forward is to come together and work practically towards creating a better future. We hope you will join us in our mission to democratize AI and to use its transformative powers to enact real, positive and lasting change.

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