Networking giant Cisco Systems selected the blockchain-based platform developed by SingularityNET to host its decentralized AGI project. Artificial General Intelligence is a branch of AI that focuses on a computer's ability to learn intellectual tasks. Whereas existing AI might learn to read characters on a page, for example, a true AGI system might intuit how to write the book. In a joint statement, Dr. Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET CEO, said, "The scale of the AGI deployments needed by a partner like Cisco is going to be tremendous, and we are working hard to make sure our AGI tools and our blockchain-based platform is up to the task." SingularityNET's platform democratizes AI by decentralizing its source, preventing any single force or player from hoarding computers' capacity to learn.

Decentralized artificial intelligence(AI) is one of the most promising trends in the AI space. The hype around decentralized AI has increased lately with the raise on popularity of blockchain technologies. While the value proposition of decentralized AI systems is very clear from a conceptual standpoint, their implementation is full of challenges. Arguably, the biggest challenges of implementing decentralized AI architectures are in the area of security and privacy. The foundation of decentralized AI systems is an environment in which different parties such as data providers, data scientists and consumers collaborate to create, train and execute AI models without the need of a centralized authority.

Cointelegraph talks with AI visionary Ben Goertzel, who shares with us his vision of the future of AI and computing, while also offering insights on how to guide an "artificial general intelligence" toward good, rather than evil. The author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, Goertzel is chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation, Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity, founder and CEO of SingularityNet, and chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. He has been working for years, along with a team of dozens researchers scattered around the globe, to create the world's first AI marketplace powered by Blockchain technologies. BG: I began my career as a mathematics Ph.D. in the 1980s. I was an academic for awhile, then I entered industry in the late 90's and I've been doing artificial intelligence applications in sort of every industry you can imagine from genetics, bioinformatics, and natural language processing.