Fetch.ai and Singularity.net collaborate for “ethical and accurate AI”

The crypto world’s two most active AI projects are working together to overcome the major challenges of AI development – and pave the way for decentralized general artificial intelligence. We take the opportunity to provide an overview of what has happened at Fetch.ai and SingularyNET over the past year.

Fetch.ai and Singularity.net are the two showcase projects for crypto and AI. Now the two are partnering to address two key challenges facing the AI ​​industry: the hallucinations of language models and their problems with multi-step reasoning.

From 2024, the two startups or cryptocurrencies – the difference is even less clear here than elsewhere – want to launch several products that solve these problems.

As far as the specific plans are concerned, the press release remains somewhat nebulous. Fetch.ai and SingularityNET will “leverage their decentralized AI platforms to build AI models with superior reliability and reasoning capabilities.” Developers can address these models through traditional programming languages ​​and simple APIs, such as those already offered by Fetch.ai and SingularityNET.

The press release explains a little more specifically that the core of the cooperation is to use the “decentralized infrastructure to connect LLMs” – i.e. language models like ChatGPT – “with knowledge graphs and logical argumentation engines.” The two platforms could create “an intelligence that is larger than its parts.”

For Humayun Sheikh, head of Fetch.ai, the partnership marks “a crucial moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence.” For SingularityNET founder Ben Goertzel, it is “an important step on our path towards useful decentralized artificial general intelligence (AGI).” So there is agreement that the partnership has meaning beyond the crypto world.

Bullshit bingo or a win for AI development?

It is difficult for technical laypeople to say how plausible these announcements are. On the one hand, there are researchers from the University of Cambridge behind Fetch.ai and a widely recognized AI researcher, Ben Goertzel, behind SingularityNET. If they manage to lead further AI development to more decentralized paths instead of confining it to the silos of large corporations, this would be a benefit far beyond the crypto economy.

On the other hand, the press release could also be bullshit bingo, just trying to hide the fact that the two projects haven’t delivered much over the last year.

Or?

The Agentverse of AI

Fetch.ai calls itself “the first open network for AI agents.” AI models become modular building blocks to form applications as needed. The whole thing is coordinated via its own blockchain, which, as far as I can see, doesn’t exist yet; the agents themselves are offchain in the “Agentverse”. However, only a small handful of models can be found there so far, which may also be due to the fact that access is currently still in early access.

The Fetch.ai blog at least shows a lot of activity: A partnership with Bosch that began in spring 2023 is bearing its first fruits through the integration of Bosch’s multifunctional sensor XDK into an interface to the Agentverse.

In addition, Fetch.ai can name some achievements in its annual review for 2023. For example, the cooperation with Peaq, a multichain platform for DePINs (more on that here), which allows AI agents to be coordinated across blockchains. With DeltaV, Fetch has launched a platform that, thanks to a language model, allows agents to be addressed with text commands.

There is also a $40 million investment, the launch of a framework to simplify the release of AI agents, and several hack days and events. Fetch.ai wasn’t lazy last year.

The marketplace for AI modules

A lot has also happened at SingularityNET in 2023. The project is “the world’s leading AI marketplace on a blockchain.” In the marketplace, AI developers can offer the services of their models, and buyers can apply them in a modular manner. The marketplace currently offers 85 AI services, mostly in the area of ​​language models.

The number of sales is not mentioned, but judging by the number of reviews, there isn’t much going on in the marketplace. Maybe this is also because you need the AGIX tokens to buy.

There is also a growing ecosystem around SingularityNET. These “spin-offs” cover a wide range of topics and are intended to populate the platform itself. SingularityNET sees itself as an incubator for modular AI developments.

There are a total of 12 spin-offs that use AI models for investment, medicine, health, games, cloud computing, music, media and also strive to create artificial general intelligence.

In addition, over the past year, SingularityNET has recruited new employees, held workshops and hack days on AI, founded a DAO to coordinate the funding of spin-offs and more. Apparently people didn’t rest here either.

Ambitious, but not yet very successful

Both projects are certainly active and would not rely on creating a bullshit bingo partnership to generate attention. Both work with modular approaches to decentralize artificial intelligence and combine this with physical infrastructure such as sensors or cloud computing. Finally, both projects are involved in hack days and AI research.

That sounds relatively positive and at least serious. Whether their approach has a chance of asserting itself against OpenAI and Microsoft and other key, large players is another question. It would undoubtedly be desirable, but the actual products – SingularityNET’s marketplace and Fetch.ai’s Agentverse – have not yet taken off.