The concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that is able to carry out tasks and understand the world in the way that humans do has been around since 2005 when it was first mooted by Dr Ben Goertzel and Cassio Pennachin in their book Artificial General Intelligence. A new collaboration between network specialist Cisco and AI company SingularityNET brings practical AGI a step closer, with a commitment to developing applied technologies and customer solutions. SingularityNET's AGI technologies include a custom version of the OpenCog AGI engine, along with a variety of unique deep neural net technologies for vision, language and other data types, and a decentralized blockchain-based platform suited for deployment of AI technologies across all markets. "These corporate investments into AGI are occurring not only out of a desire to spur rapid progress toward important research and humanitarian goals, but also because AGI capability is expected to provide tremendous commercial benefit to whomever develops it," says Dr Goertzel. "This benefit may initially take the form of a generation of'Narrow AGI' systems that infuse general intelligence into products in specific vertical markets like, say, advertising, medical research, computer networking or financial analytics."