Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via
blockchains. He is a leading developer of the
OpenCog framework for artificial general intelligence. Goertzel was an associate and grant recipient of
Jeffrey Epstein. He received a $100,000 grant from the
Jeffrey Epstein Foundation for artificial general intelligence research in 2001. When interviewed by
The New York Times about Epstein in 2019, Goertzel said, "I have no desire to talk about Epstein right now... The stuff I'm reading about him in the papers is pretty disturbing and goes way beyond what I thought his misdoings and kinks were. Yecch."
Sophia the Robot Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of
Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia
robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and
OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a
PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while computer scientist
Yann LeCun, then
Meta's chief AI scientist, made several unflattering remarks including calling the project "complete bullshit".
Views on AI In May 2007, Goertzel spoke at a
Google tech talk about his approach to creating
artificial general intelligence. He defines intelligence as the ability to detect patterns in the world and in the agent itself, measurable in terms of
emergent behavior of "achieving complex goals in complex environments". A "baby-like" artificial intelligence is initialized, then trained as an agent in a simulated or virtual world such as
Second Life to produce a more powerful intelligence. Knowledge is represented in a network whose nodes and links carry probabilistic
truth values as well as "attention values", with the attention values resembling the weights in a
neural network. Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilistic
inference engine and a custom version of
evolutionary programming. The 2012 documentary
The Singularity by independent filmmaker
Doug Wolens discussed Goertzel's views on AGI. In 2023 Goertzel postulated that artificial intelligence could
replace up to 80 percent of human jobs in the coming years "without having an AGI, by my guess. Not with ChatGPT exactly as a product. But with systems of that nature". At the Web Summit 2023 in Rio de Janeiro, Goertzel spoke out against efforts to curb AI research and that AGI is only a few years away. Goertzel's belief is that AGI will be a net positive for humanity by assisting with societal problems such as, but not limited to,
climate change. ==Bibliography==