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.
The fast-growing demand for cryptocurrencies calls for a convenient way to administer them. Melon is one such platform that works through a blockchain protocol allowing easy and efficient maintenance of cryptocurrencies. Acting as a hedge fund, Melon presents a fully customizable administration of your digital assets. You can use it as an online vault that allows you to store and transact your funds through its web portal. Melon was developed to meet the need for a cost-efficient and technologically advanced hedge fund to manage digital assets. Reto Trinkler and Mona El Isa founded the company, Melonport AG in July 2016. The company created Melon as a digital asset management protocol. It is a first of its kind system that enables the users to store, administer, and invest in crypto assets through a decentralized network. Melon works through a fully decentralized infrastructure. All the information of the user, such as smart contracts, assets, and records are saved on a decentralized blockchain network. It not only offers reliability for the storage of information but also reduces the risk of custody. The protocol also offers a decentralized system of execution through the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Smart contracts are distributed across multiple Ethereum networks to provide better efficiency and security for the assets. With the Melon protocol, users can save both time and money for investing in a hedge fund. Additionally, there is no requirement of a third party approval from a lawyer or advisor. Melon’s ICO was launched in February 2017 and sold out within 10 minutes. Melonport is aiming to bridge the gap between the portfolio managers and the investors by removing the role of the third parties such as law firms. Melonport’s CEO, Mona El Isa comes from a strong financial background and is versed with the problems of the investment industry. There is still a lot of work to be done on the Melon project, even though things are looking quite positive already. An audit of the protocol has been completed already, and the project continues to advance. No further specifics have been provided on the website, although it remains to be seen what the future holds. Bringing more value to Melon Coin would be a good idea, yet it remains to be seen how that might be achieved.