Since computer scientist Ben Goertzel wrote his first line of artificial intelligence (AI) code 30 years ago, he has firmly believed that AI should be decentralized. Today, as the world approaches the dawn of artificial general intelligence (AGI), who can lead this breakthrough will have a profound impact on the future of humanity.
At the Consensus conference held in Toronto, Canada, Goertzel was interviewed by Cointelegraph, where he stated, "We are likely to launch AGI that can think and surpass its training and programming within the next one to three years."
His project, SingularityNET, is a decentralized ecosystem dedicated to building a global AI services marketplace. In the process, the project has partnered with Mind Network and the Filecoin Foundation, investing $53 million in a modular supercomputer dedicated to decentralized AGI, and completed token mergers with Ocean Protocol and Fetch.ai to unify efforts in decentralized AI development.
In 2024, Goertzel founded the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI Alliance), the world's largest open-source initiative dedicated to decentralized AGI.
Goertzel stated that SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance "may be the only serious AGI R&D teams outside of large tech companies, and certainly the only one in the crypto space. I do not mean to belittle other teams in the crypto space doing cool AI projects."
For Goertzel, these milestones represent a return to fundamental principles. After decades of developing AI and advocating for decentralization, the broader tech community has finally caught up, transforming once-radical ideas into the driving force of a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
Goertzel remarked, "In 1993, 1994, and 1995, I gradually realized that AI should be decentralized."
The following year, he wrote the first decentralized AI code using a beta version of Java and founded his first AI company in New York in 1997.
At that time, the internet itself was decentralized, so it seemed natural that AI should also be decentralized.
He said, "What I didn't foresee at the time was that the internet would become so centralized, because back then, the internet was truly decentralized."
The subsequent evolution of the internet undermined the foundations of decentralization. Goertzel said, "What happened later was that you had Google, you had Facebook, you had Tencent—these companies built massive centralized internet mirrors on huge data centers."
However, for the next step toward AGI, Goertzel believes that decentralization is a fundamental safeguard against technological monopolies and abuses. This principle is embedded in the architecture of SingularityNET, Hyperon, and the upcoming ASI Chain (a modular blockchain designed for decentralized AI).
His argument is that AGI must be decentralized from the start, rather than adopted retroactively, so that it benefits humanity rather than serving centralized power.
Goertzel stated, "The development in the post-AGI era could be vastly different depending on whether decentralized ecosystems work." He added:
"We hope to collaborate with other decentralized teams to be one of the first or earliest teams to achieve this goal."
Perhaps due to his anarchist tendencies and the desire to "achieve anarchism in cyberspace," Goertzel explored the idea of decentralized currency in the 90s.
Although it sounded interesting at the time, Goertzel and his friends concluded that transaction times would be too slow and costs too high, making the idea impractical.
Just a few decades later, a person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto created the first successful implementation of decentralized currency, Bitcoin (BTC). Ironically, its transactions remain slow and expensive—perhaps by design or due to its growing popularity—so Goertzel's early skepticism was not entirely unfounded.
He also admitted that at the time, he and his friends "were not commercially savvy enough to think of ideas like money laundering, online sales of drugs and guns as business models."
He perhaps half-jokingly mentioned the dark web market Silk Road, which used Bitcoin for anonymous transactions until it was shut down by authorities in 2013.
Related: Shielded CEO: On-chain privacy is essential in the age of AI
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