Blockchain Crucial for Democratizing AI

Janet Adams, COO of SingularityNET, believes blockchain is crucial for democratizing powerful technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). A view that runs contrary to the prevailing sentiment that AI and blockchain are incompatible.

Janet Adams, the chief operating officer of SingularityNET, the company behind the most popular AI utility token, AGIX, believes blockchain is crucial to democratizing AI. Speaking exclusively to BeInCrypto, Adams went against the grain of much of the industry, which largely believes the two technologies cannot integrate.

SingularityNET’s Role

SingularityNET is a decentralized platform that aims to facilitate the creation, interaction, and coordination of AI.

“Blockchain is the fabric of decentralization,” Adams stated. She went on to offer a general assessment of the complementarity of blockchain and AI.

“For safe Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and for democratic access to powerful technologies, there is no technology better than blockchain for implementing democratic and decentralized governance and access.” 

Blockchain Democratizes AI

“Blockchain enables the decentralized governance, the decentralized everything, and our AIs are all run on our decentralized marketplace,” she continued.

Dr. Ben Goertzel founded SingularityNET in 2017. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence. A term used to describe highly autonomous systems that possess human-level cognitive capabilities.

AGI includes abilities 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,” argued Adams. “But, it would certainly take a huge amount of extra engineering, work, time, and expense. Blockchain is the perfect technology.”

Proponents of AI are understandably anxious about the danger of replicating the centralization and inequality of Big Tech. Of the five biggest companies on the planet, 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 governed by the widest group of people on the planet.”

Are AI and Blockchain Compatible?

SingularityNET’s AGIX 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, comparing them to oil and water.

“Blockchain and AI are not complementary, and (for now) anyone jumping on the ‘AI’ bandwagon is simply doing so for pump and dump reasons. If you see a project all of a sudden pivot 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.”

In a discussion with 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 two technologies’ incompatibility.

The AI token boom has cooled off considerably since the highs of February and March. The rush became so intense that traders could have potentially walked away with a multiple of thousands of their original investment in mere weeks. 

SingularityNET’s flagship token, AGIX, saw significant gains too. If not quite in the same ballpark as ANW and GNY. Its sharpest pump was a 205% increase in just five days in early February.