Sophia the Robot is Crowdfunding AI 'Global Brain' to Make Herself Smarter

Sophia, the humanoid robot, wants to crowdfund the development of advanced artificial intelligence through a token-based system where users can buy and sell services in a marketplace. SingularityNET, the project that will enable this exchange, announced Tuesday an upcoming token sale that will help Sophia expand her capabilities.

The company describes a “global brain” with multiple A.I. systems working together to complete tasks. Developers can create new A.I.s, and users can pay to take advantage of their services through blockchain payments similar to the technology behind Bitcoin. SingularityNET is working with Cindicator, a predictive intelligence for asset management, to grow their A.I. needs.

It’s a markedly different approach to A.I. development tha the likes of Google and Facebook, which have instead depended on creating systems that benefit their overall business model. For instance, Facebook revealed this week that it was using A.I. to identify when users are thinking of suicide.

That’s a feature that could have much wider-ranging social benefits, but it’s also one designed specifically with the needs of Facebook’s social network in mind as opposed to being built expressly for the general benefit of humanity — and, as Sophia would point out, the benefit of other sentiences.

Sophia herself, whose title these days is Hanson Robotics’ “Chief Humanoid Officer,” took to video to cut a promo for SingularityNET.

The company will start selling tokens on December 8 at noon Eastern time. The amount of tokens available during the crowdsale depends on how many are sold during the as-yet unfinalized private sales. When 500 million tokens are sold for the value of $36 million between the crowd and private sales, the overall sale will end.

Pre-registration will take place through the company’s whitelist page, where potential buyers can note their interest and set a contribution amount.

Read the abstract for the company’s whitepaper on its A.I. services marketplace below, which is available in full here.

The value and power of Artificial Intelligence is growing dramatically every year, and will soon dominate the internet – and the economy as a whole. However, AI tools today are fragmented by a closed development environment; most are developed by one company to perform one task, and there is no way to plug two tools together. SingularityNET aims to become the key protocol for networking AI and machine learning tools to form a coordinated Artificial General Intelligence.

SingularityNET is an open-source protocol and collection of smart contracts for a decentralized market of coordinated AI services. Within this framework, the benefits of AI become a global commons infrastructure for the benefit of all; anyone can access AI tech or become a stakeholder in its development. Anyone can add an AI/machine learning service to SingularityNET for use by the network, and receive network payment tokens in exchange.

SingularityNET is backed by the SingularityNET Foundation, which operates on a belief that the benefits of AI should not be dominated by any small set of powerful institutions, but shared by all. A key goal of SingularityNET is to ensure the technology is benevolent according to human standards, and the network is designed to incentivize and reward beneficial players.