Blockchain
Janet Adams, COO of SingularityNET, believes that blockchain is critical to democratizing powerful technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). A view that is at odds with the prevailing feeling that AI and blockchain are incompatible.
Janet Adams, the chief operating officer of SingularityNET, the company behind AGIX, the most popular AI utility token, believes blockchain is critical to democratizing AI. Speaking exclusively with BeInCrypto, Adams went against the grain of much of the industry, which largely believes the two technologies cannot integrate.
The role of SingularityNET
SingularityNET is a decentralized platform that aims to facilitate the creation, interaction and coordination of AI.
“Blockchain is the fabric of decentralization,” said Adams. She continued with a general assessment of the complementarity of blockchain and AI.
“For secure artificial general intelligence (AGI) and for democratic access to powerful technologies, there is no better technology than blockchain for implementing democratic and decentralized governance and access.”
Blockchain democratizes AI
“Blockchain enables the decentralized governance, the decentralized everything, and our AIs all run on our decentralized marketplace,” she continued.
Dr. Ben Goertzel founded SingularityNET in 2017. He is one of the world’s leading experts in artificial general intelligence. A term used to describe highly autonomous systems that possess human-level cognitive capabilities.
AGI includes skills such as understanding, learning, reasoning, problem solving and creative thinking. SingularityNET estimates that human-level AGI is only three to seven years away.
Would it be impossible to have a democratic AI without blockchain? “No,” objected Adams. “But it would certainly require a huge amount of additional engineering, work, time and cost. Blockchain is the perfect technology.”
AI proponents are understandably concerned about the danger of replicating the centralization and disparity of Big Tech. Of the five largest companies in the world, four are tech giants: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon.
“We are very committed to using the blockchain, with our decentralization methods, to ensure that our AI is controlled by the broadest group of people in the world.”
Are AI and Blockchain Compatible?
SingularityNET is the second largest AI token by market capitalization according to Cryptoslate.
However, not everyone is convinced of the plausibility of linking AI and blockchain. Many figures in the industry have expressed skepticism about their compatibility. Andre Cronje, the founder of smart contract platform Fantom, has said the two don’t mix, likening them to oil and water.
“Blockchain and AI are not complementary, and (for now) anyone who jumps on the ‘AI’ bandwagon is simply doing so for pump-and-dump reasons. If you see a project suddenly switch to AI, it just means they had nothing and are dead in the water… Blockchains don’t improve AI, and AI doesn’t improve blockchain.”
Speaking to BeInCrypto, Lex Sokolin, Chief Cryptoeconomist at Consenys, described AI and blockchain as “orthogonal vectors”. in his view, they are independent, distinctive and “express very different things.”
During the peak of the AI token boom, BeInCrypto heard from multiple industry figures about the incompatibility of the two technologies.
The AI token boom has cooled significantly since the February and March highs. The rush became so intense that traders could have walked away with multiples of thousands of their original investment in just weeks.
SingularityNET’s flagship token, AGIX, also posted significant gains. If not quite in the same ballpark as ANW and GNY. The sharpest pump was a 205% increase in just five days in early February.