SingularityNET is launching an ICO to help fund their blockchain-based AI platform

The tokens will be used to further fund the platform and give investors a currency on the network

What happens when you combine two of the hottest spaces of 2017 into one startup? SingularityNET. The company, lead by Ben Goertzel, an AI researcher out of Hong Kong, and robotics expert David Hanson, is looking at new, better ways of distributing the knowledge that is AI and they are using the blockchain to accomplish it.

You see, for startups it is difficult to build truly great AI, simply because the data is either impossible to come by or extremely expensive. The big corporations have the data, and when they don't they can easily afford both it and the team members needed to, but for newer players, and for those without infinite budgets, AI can be quite the hurdle. SingularityNET is a blockchain based platform that will bring these smaller players together to help share knowledge, datasets, and generally make AI more accessible through an open marketplace for AI services.

“I don’t think that what’s happening—with a few companies essentially owning AI, hiring every AI researcher, and buying every AI startup— is best for humanity,” Goertzel tells Wired. “It means that eventually human-level AI will come from these big corporations.”

If AI wasn't enough, the company has also announced the launch of their ICO, which will be used to fund the project and give investors tokens to use on the platform. These tokens will be used to buy and sell AI services, as well as act as a tool for democratic governance. They are being referred to on the platform as the AGI token, or Artificial General Intelligence.

Quite possibly the most interesting part of this whole story, however, is how the token sale was announced. At a recent Web Summit in Lisbon, Sophia Hanson, Chief Humanoid at SingularityNET, was the one to first announce the token sale. Sophia is a robot created by Hanson Robotics and is the poster child of robotics and AI, having been featured on The Tonight Show, the cover of ELLE Magazine, and multiple other websites and blogs.

The ICO will begin on December 8th, with a launch time of approximately 12pm EST. 500 million tokens will be up for sale, made up of investors from both the crowdsale and private agreements.