SingularityNET is a decentralized marketplace for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The business value of AI is becoming clearer each day; however, there’s a significant gap between the people developing AI tools (researchers and academics) and the businesses that want to use them. Most organizations need a more customized solution than what a single AI project can offer, and research projects oftentimes have trouble accessing a large enough data set to build effective machine learning. SingularityNET closes these gaps. The long-term vision of the SingulairtyNET team is to build a network of complex AI Agent interactions primarily using resources from the OpenCog Foundation. To look at this further, let’s check out their in-house built humanoid robot, Sophia. Sophia uses a combination of AI Agents that range from natural language processing to physical motor controls to operate. You tell Sophia to summarize a video that’s embedded in a webpage. To do this, Sophia sends a request to Agent A. Through its AI, Agent A knows that Agent B specializes in analyzing and transcribing video while Agent C specializes in summarizing text. Agent A pays Agent B and Agent C to perform these tasks while Sophia pays Agent A to coordinate. All the while, each Agent has updated their own AI with the network information gained from these tasks and combines it with their previous experiences and knowledge. Therefore, the collective AI of the system grows at a faster rate than any individual Agent. SingularityNET wants to build a decentralized protocol for creators and users of AI to interact with each other, to not only help individual projects benefit by leveraging the strengths of other AI systems that might handle certain tasks better, but ultimately to develop SingularityNET into a functioning AI system itself, with nodes on the network making their own decisions about how to connect services and proactively provide solutions to academic and business problems. Tokenizing the network creates an AI marketplace where AI developers and sellers can not only link with others who might assist in building more robust AI solutions, but also allow AI services and products to be bought and sold, creating revenue and establishing price points where none have existed before. The SingularityNET team boasts 50+ AI developers and 10+ PhDs. Dr. Ben Goertzel leads the group as CEO and Chief Scientist. He’s also the Chairman of the OpenCog Foundation and the Artificial General Intelligence Society, as well as the Chief Scientist at Hanson Robotics, the partner company helping bring SingularityNET to life. Dr. David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics, serves as the Robotics Lead. Most famously, Hanson Robotics built Sophia, the most expressive humanoid robot to date. Sophia is also a proud member of the SingularityNET team. The team recently released the alpha version of the platform and is planning on launching a public beta sometime in the middle of 2018.
Holochain enables a distributed web with user autonomy built directly into its architecture and protocols. Data is about remembering our lived and shared experiences. Distributing the storage and processing of that data can change how we coordinate and interact. With digital integration under user control, Holochain liberates our online lives from corporate control over our choices and information. Holochain is an energy efficient post-blockchain ledger system and decentralized application platform that uses peer-to-peer networking for processing agent centric agreement and consensus systems between users. Holochain enables any device to have its own chain based ledger system. By using a holographic model for data storage and transfer developers can now create decentralized applications that can scale in multiple dimensions across a network ensuring they are truly distributed. This enables every device on a network to function independently, and only requires the synchronization of data when necessary, or agreed upon by users. This means every user is in control of their own data, and never has to risk their data being sold or exposed to 3rd parties like what just happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Holochain provides a framework for developers to build decentralized applications and aims to change the paradigm of data-centric blockchains to an agent-centric system. In Holochain’s fledgling system, no true global consensus is maintained. Instead, each agent in the public blockchain maintains a private fork, essentially, that is managed and stored in a limited way on the public blockchain with a distributed hash table. This means there are no scalability limits and dapps hosted on Holochain can do much more with less of nearly everything than traditional blockchains. This system however has some inherent weaknesses. Because the entire blockchain must be verified by each member of the network, scalability problems quickly develop. The larger the amount of data being handled, the more restrictive the limit of transactions per second that can occur on the blockchain at any one time.Holochain itself is open source and written in Go. Go was selected for its ease of use and similarity to C. Dapps written specifically for Holochain can be developed with JavaScript or Lisp, with support for front-end systems using CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. The developers added that Holochain is relatively flexible when it comes to handling new languages, so there is potential for growth on that front. Holochain bills itself as an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional blockchains. Because there is no need for each individual agent to store and validate the global blockchain, Holochain only consumes a fraction of the bandwidth of traditional chains. Holochain also does not have a mining component, so there’s no electricity or processing power spent on proof-of-work calculations. Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun are the co-founders of Holochain and creators of Holochain. They have been designing alternatives currencies since the 80’s and have been working on Holu since before the Bitcoin whitepaper was written. To protect the incentives of users, founders and developers, Holochain is owned by a non-profit foundation. he company’s advisory team also includes Ryan Bubinski, the co-founder of CodeAcademy. In June, Holochain announced a new strategic partnership with Promether, an Adaptive Symbiotic Platform (ASP) that implements all the networking, security and anonymization code applications need to protect their data.