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.
NEM is a highly versatile crypto solution which seeks to adhere to a host of mainstream industry requirements. It is written in Java and JavaScript with 100% original source code. NEM has a stated goal of a wide distribution model and has introduced new features in blockchain technology in its proof-of-importance (POI) algorithm. NEM also features an integrated P2P secure and encrypted messaging system, multisignature accounts and an Eigentrust++ reputation system. Essentially, NEM is designed as a financial blockchain solution and can be used for payment, clearing and settlement in a private environment which is highly controlled. This means that NEM meets several of the regulatory requirements and guidelines in the financial industry. This allows it to be used to settle (change of ownership) any asset via the blockchain. Mijin which is a private chain of NEM has gained popularity and companies such as Hitachi have already embraced it. Why NEM? Many banks around the world have come to accept the importance of blockchain technology. In fact, a good number of banks in the U.S, India and Japan have already started using the technology. Because banks generally employ the smart contract concept, NEM’s platform which is asset-friendly can be used to settle any asset. In settling assets, speed, security, and reliability are very important to a mainstream institution which is what this crypto offers. NEM addresses these issues by repackaging its blockchain into a private chain and presenting it as Mijin. NEM crypto is also applicable in the technology world. Unlike Bitcoin and Dogecoin which use mining to increase the number of coins, XEM uses something called ‘harvesting’. In this process, blocks are generated and a person is rewarded for work contributed using transaction fees. Every block has a certain number of transactions which attract an unknown amount of fees. This keeps the participants incentivized to continue harvesting. For a blockchain user to be allowed to harvest, one must go through a forging mechanism process called Proof-of-Importance (POI). POI is the algorithm used in NEM to time stamp transactions. A NEM user's importance is determined by how many coins they have and the number of transactions made to and from their wallet. POI uses the NCDawareRank network centrality measure, the topology of the transaction graph, as well as a number of other relevant signals to achieve consensus. POI is different from other initiatives which use a fee-sharing model that does not take into consideration one's overall support of the network. In proof-of-stake systems a person needs to have large numbers of coins to form a block, but in NEM transactions volume and trust become factors. This was designed to encourage users of NEM to not simply hold XEM but instead actively carry out transactions. To be eligible for entering the importance calculation, an account must have at least 10,000 vested XEM. All accounts owning more than 10,000 vested XEM have a non-zero importance score. With a supply of 8,999,999,999 XEM, the theoretical maximum number of accounts with non-zero importance is 899,999. In practice, the number of actual accounts with non-zero importance is not expected to approach the theoretical max due to inequalities in held XEM and also the temporal costs associated with vesting. If NEM becomes very popular, a threshold of 10,000 vested XEM could be undesirable. If necessary, this number could be updated in the future via a hard fork, which is the same procedure for adjusting transaction fees and other parameters related to harvesting.