Advanced AI System Is Already “Self-Aware”;

ASI Alliance Founder Warns

ASI Alliance founder Ben Goertzel is quoted saying that the alpha version of OpenCog Hyperon — the artificial general intelligence system he’s been developing for more than two decades — is already “self-aware” to a certain extent. (Now there is a qualifying statement, if ever there was one. A wishful statement where its ‘sorta-kinda-maybe true. )

Goertzel also believes OpenAI likely shied away from making its “very impressive” new o1 model an autonomous agent for fear that it would be seen as “risky and dangerous” and provoke a crackdown from regulators.

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance was formed in March this year, bringing together Goertzel’s SingularityNET project, Ocean Protocol and DeepMind veteran Humayun Sheikh’s FetchAI.

This week, 96% of CUDOS voters approved the decentralized cloud hardware network’s merger with ASI. The merger will boost the compute available for Goertzel’s plans to scale up OpenCog Hyperon, the AGI system he’s been working on since 2001 and launched as an open-source AI framework in 2008.

AGI systems need self-awareness for autonomy

Hold on, Goertzel’s saying the current model is self aware?

What I mean by self-aware is that from the get-go, even the current versions, I mean, it has a model of who it is. It has a model of who you are. It has certain goals it’s trying to achieve in the situation. It knows how it relates to that situation and what it’s trying to do. And a ChatGPT sort of system isn’t really doing that right.”

The system combines a logical reasoning engine, evolutionary program learning and deep neural nets implemented in a dynamic knowledge graph that revises and modifies itself.

Incidentally, Goertzel says the lack of a world model explains why none of the autonomous AI agents built so far have really worked. You can’t just take a “question-answering system” and tell it “you are an agent interacting with the world.”

Training neural nets and transformers on decentralized equipment is currently a nonstarter.

But he says logical reasoning and evolution learning via algorithms “run very naturally on a decentralized network of machines.”