Artificial intelligence is growing more valuable and powerful every year and will soon dominate the internet. Visionaries like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have predicted that a “technological singularity” will occur during this century. TheSingularityNET platform brings blockchain and AI together to create a new AI fabric that delivers superior practical AI functionality today while moving toward the fulfillment of Singularitarian artificial general intelligence visions.

Today’s AI tools are fragmented by a closed development environment. Most are developed by one company and perform one extremely narrow task, and there is no straightforward, standard way to plug two tools together. SingularityNET aims to become the leading protocol for networking AI and machine learning tools to form highly effective applications across vertical markets and ultimately generate coordinated artificial general intelligence. Most AI research today is controlled by a handful of corporations—those with the resources to fund development.

Independent developers of AI tools have no readily available way to monetize their creations. Usually, their most lucrative option is to sell their tool to one of the big tech companies, leading to control of the technology becoming even more concentrated. SingularityNET’s open-source protocol and collection of smart contracts are designed to address these problems. Developers can launch their AI tools on the network, where they can interoperate with other AIs and with paying users.

Not only does the SingularityNET platform give developers a commercial launchpad (much like app stores give mobile app developers an easy path to market), it also allows the AIs to interoperate, creating a more synergistic, broadly capable intelligence. For example, if a text-to-speech AI and an Italian-to-English translation AI were both on the network, then the network as a whole would be capable of using Italian text to produce English speech. Within this framework, AI transforms from a corporate asset to a global commons; anyone can access AI tech or become a stakeholder in its development. Also, 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 believes that the benefits of AI should not accrue only to a small set of powerful institutions, but rather should be shared by all. A key goal of SingularityNET is ensuring that the technology is benevolent by human standards and that the network is designed to incentivize and reward beneficial players. This is critical given the explicit aspiration of the project —alongside shorter-term practical and commercial goals— to play a central role in launching the technological singularity as foreseen by Vinge, Kurzweil, and others by catalyzing the emergence and economic pervasiveness of self-modifying, self-improving, self-understanding artificial general intelligence.