SingularityNET, a startup that bills itself as a “decentralized artificial intelligence” company, said today it’s working with networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. on an ambitious project to create more advanced AI technologies that will soon be able to surpass humans in their ability to learn and perform new tasks.

The partnership is a strong validation of SingularityNET’s technologies, which include a blockchain-based, decentralized marketplace for AI algorithms, and various deep neural net models for computer vision and language understanding. Its biggest project, however, is a customized version of the OpenCog Advanced General Intelligence engine, an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to “human-equivalent AGI.”

AGI is an emerging new field within AI, or some might even say a more superior form of it. Traditional AI generally refers to the ability of a machine to imitate human cognition, such as learning and problem-solving. But most AI models remain quite primitive, specialized on training machines at a single task, whether that’s image recognition, playing chess or studying medical data.

There’s no strict definition of AGI, but most experts agree that it refers to a machine that has the same level of intelligence as a human, and is therefore able to learn new concepts and tasks in just the same way a human can, without any previous training, such as C3P0 from “Star Wars,” HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Agent Smith from “The Matrix.”

Of course, those examples of AGI as depicted by Hollywood don’t exist outside of the big screen, but SingularityNET and Cisco are on a mission to make them a reality. And they say they’ve already made good progress, using OpenCog’s reasoning technology to analyze the output of Cisco’s deep neural nets in an urban traffic management context to create a system that’s able to learn new concepts entirely on its own.

“It was able to learn some of these things on its own: where the roads are, the sidewalks etc. and determine what’s a potential problem with the jaywalking, cars on the sidewalk, collisions and other things,” said Hugo Latapie, a principal engineer at Cisco’s Chief Technology and Architecture Office. “This is real, it’s functioning, and we’re actually looking at deploying this.”

Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET’s founder, chief scientist and chief executive officer, said he believes AGI will advance far beyond this relatively simple example however. Within the next decade, he said, AGIs with higher IQs than humans will become commonplace.

“We’re going to see AGI elements coming into play this year,” he said. “Within the next couple years, you’ll start to see tremendously intelligent agents that start to really solve some of the problems that we’re having.”

Goertzel said SingularityNET was partnering with Cisco because of its need for an AI system that can generalize and learn across different areas.

“The scale of the AGI deployments needed by a partner like Cisco is going to be tremendous, and we are working hard to make sure our AGI tools and our blockchain-based platform is up to the task,” he said. “The work we’ve done with Cisco on smart traffic analytics using OpenCog’s logical reasoning and deep neural networks just scratches the surface. Let’s just say we have some much broader and deeper conversations going on.”

“AI is the most transformative new technology around and vendors need to cooperate to fully tap into the potential – from a research, talent and global perspective,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “But partnering is easy, delivering successful, working AI products is quite another thingt, so we will have to see what comes out of this new partnership.”

Images: SingularityNET