New collaboration paves the way for Artificial General Intelligence

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."

These technologies have been already applied in various fields including finance, genomics, natural language processing, national security, gaming, robotics, and others. The OpenCog tools and SingularityNET platform have also been used to enhance the intelligence of Hanson Robotics' Sophia robot, generally considered to be the world’s most emotionally advanced humanoid robot.

Hugo Latapie, a principal engineer at Cisco's Chief Technology and Architecture Office sees the Cisco and SingularityNET collaboration as an important step in a larger revolution. He says, "In 10 years you're going to see AGIs with IQs higher than humans. One thing you get when you apply, when you take a theory and see how it's working in the real world, you get a grounding in how it's working... Based on my experience making these systems that have some small elements of AGI, I’m pretty convinced that in 10 years we're going to have it."

Cisco has also provided support to Dr Gino Yu's lab at Hong Kong Poly U to pursue applications of SingularityNET and OpenCog technology to network root cause analysis. "The work we've done with Cisco on smart traffic analytics using OpenCog's logical reasoning and deep neural networks just scratch the surface,” adds Dr Goertzel. Let's just say we have some much broader and deeper conversations going on."

You can find out more on the SingularityNET blog.

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