AI Revolution: Why Ben Goertzel Thinks Decentralization Will Save Us All 🤖🌍

Thirty years ago, when most people were still figuring out how to send an email without accidentally emailing their boss a cat meme, Ben Goertzel was already wrestling with the idea that artificial intelligence must be decentralized. Now, as humanity teeters on the edge of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the question of who will steer this ship—into utopia or straight into the iceberg—has never been more pressing.

At the Consensus conference in Toronto, Goertzel, with the air of a man who’s seen too many centralized servers crash, declared, “We’re likely to be able to launch AGI that can think and generalize beyond its training and programming within the next one to three years.” No pressure, right?

His brainchild, SingularityNET, is less a company and more a wild bazaar where AI services jostle for attention. Along the way, it’s made friends with Mind Network and Filecoin Foundation, thrown $53 million at a modular supercomputer (because why not?), and merged tokens with Ocean Protocol and Fetch.ai in a move that sounds suspiciously like the plot of a sci-fi buddy comedy.

In 2024, Goertzel founded the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance—the world’s largest open-source initiative for decentralized AGI. If you’re not impressed yet, you probably haven’t tried debugging distributed systems at 3 a.m.

SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance are “probably the only serious AGI R&D team outside of Big Tech, certainly the only one in the crypto space, and I don’t mean any slight against others doing cool AI stuff in the crypto space,” Goertzel said, with all the subtlety of a man who’s just realized his competition is a handful of sleep-deprived grad students and a dog with a blockchain collar.

For Goertzel, these milestones are less about glory and more about returning to first principles. After decades of shouting into the void about decentralization, he’s finally being heard—now that there’s money in it. Funny how that works.

The substance behind decentralization

“In ’93, ’94, ’95, it became clear to me AI should be decentralized,” Goertzel said, presumably while everyone else was busy playing Minesweeper.

He wrote his first decentralized AI code using a beta version of Java—because nothing says ‘living on the edge’ like trusting your future to beta software—and founded his first AI company in New York in 1997.

Back then, the internet was a wild frontier: decentralized, chaotic, and full of promise. Naturally, Goertzel thought AI should follow suit. What he didn’t foresee was the rise of digital feudal lords—Google, Facebook, Tencent—building their own walled gardens atop massive data centers. The dream of decentralization faded beneath the weight of cat videos and targeted ads.

But as we approach AGI, Goertzel insists decentralization is not just a nice-to-have—it’s a bulwark against monopolies and misuse. That’s why SingularityNET, Hyperon, and the upcoming ASI Chain are built from the ground up to resist centralization. If AGI is going to benefit humanity rather than serve as a butler to billionaires, it must be decentralized from day one.

“The way the post-AGI period goes may be quite different depending on whether the decentralized ecosystem plays a role in it or not,” he mused, probably while staring dramatically into the middle distance.

“We are hoping that we, in collaboration with other decentralized teams, will be the first or among the very first to make it happen.”

A brief foray into decentralized money

Perhaps inspired by anarchist dreams (and maybe too much coffee), Goertzel dabbled in decentralized money back in the 90s. He and his friends quickly realized that transaction times would be slower than dial-up internet and more expensive than New York rent—so they shelved the idea.

Fast forward a few decades: Satoshi Nakamoto launches Bitcoin. Transactions are still slow and expensive—so maybe Goertzel was onto something after all. Or maybe he just needed better marketing.

He also admitted that he and his friends “weren’t good enough at business to hit on the idea of money laundering, selling drugs and guns online and so forth as a business model.” At least he can laugh about it now—unlike Silk Road’s founders.

Would you like me to break down or explain any part of this adaptation?

2025-05-23 21:36

The substance behind decentralization

A brief foray into decentralized money

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