With a scientific mind and deep curiosity for learning, SingularityNET’s COO, Janet Adams, is the brain behind a highly ambitious technological movement: to “win the artificial general intelligence (AGI) race.”
As someone who’s worked in traditional banking, overseeing $200M technology projects across 70 markets, Janet now has a firm foothold in Web3, mostly driven by the sector’s fairness and innovation.
Today, she works alongside SingularityNET’s visionary founder, Dr. Ben Goertzel, to turn the many benefits of AI into a collaborative, decentralized reality.
In this exclusive Q&A article, let’s explore how SingularityNET and its partners are shaping the technology landscape through initiatives like the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI), ASI Cloud, and ASI Chain.
CN: Please start by telling me what you do as COO of SingularityNET and what the company is all about.
Janet Adams: SingularityNET was founded in 2017 by our visionary founder, Dr. Ben Goertzel. At only the age of three, he decided he was going to build a robot more intelligent than the one on Star Trek. It has been his life’s work ever since to create AGI.
He made his first attempt in 1998 with the Webmind engine, and many top scientists have been working with him since then.
Now, we have decades of top researchers and developers working on the next wave in AI evolution. Together, they aim to make this tech even smarter than humans.
I have the privilege of being Ben’s right-hand woman, running the company as COO. I’m responsible for everything outside AGI, which can be super mathematical and complex.
My role includes running teams in narrow AI, cloud, blockchain, engineering, finance, business development, partnerships, marketing, and operations, as well as helping launch new spin-ups.
CN: For those new to the concept, what does ‘decentralized AI’ actually mean? Why’s it important?
Janet Adams: It’s essential to know what decentralized AI is, as it’s really at the core of what’s happening right now.
The idea of decentralized AI is to create a broad, open community around AI that’s not primarily owned or controlled by big players like OpenAI or Microsoft. Rather, everything is open source, built by contributors, and governed by the community itself.
I first learned about it when doing my master’s in AI from 2017 to 2019. In 2018, I first discovered Ben’s work, and I was impressed by his vision to use blockchain to build more powerful AI tools directly on-chain so they can actually interact with each other.
Then, I started working alongside him. I always believed in his vision and that decentralized AI could be the future, yet it’s not really until this year that I’ve gone from belief to conviction.
I genuinely believe SingularityNET is going to be a breakthrough because the capabilities of AI are developing at an extraordinary rate, roughly 10x every year.
Humans have never ever seen a trajectory like this before. If it continues, it could be 1,000x more powerful in just three years.
The speed at which AI is evolving means that any single company trying to build their AI through traditional means (hiring teams, setting budgets, managing complex legacy systems) won’t be able to keep up.
This is where the beauty of decentralized AI comes in. Tens of thousands of developers can build, interact, and co-evolve their systems on the blockchain, learning from one another to become more powerful as one.
Now I’ve come to really believe that, sorry to quote Bob Dylan, but “The times are changing.” I wholeheartedly believe that we can win the AGI race.
CN: Tell me about SingularityNET and how it has helped form the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance?
Janet Adams: SingularityNET is the OG of AGI. Since forming in 2017, we’ve become the leading AGI project and one of the only tech companies in the AGI race outside of Big Tech. To me, this is super exciting.
Right now, our company does much more than learn about AGI as we’ve been building it since the Webmind engine in 1998. In fact, we’re the only credible AGI contender in the race as we take a neural-symbolic and holistic approach.
We’ve come together with another AI company, Fetch.AI, to get bigger and tackle AGI together. By combining our resources and having CUDOS merge into the ASI Alliance, the world’s biggest DePIN company in high-end Web3, we now have far greater resources and a more comprehensive tech stack.
Our decentralized approach means we don’t compete with others in Web3 but work together, as a community that shares a passion for positive impact across the planet. The bigger the community, the broader and better our chances are of winning the AGI race.
Together, we’ve also launched the first foundational model for language models, with over 2M agents running on our platform.
If you think about AGI as providing vast symbolic reasoning and much more intelligent AI systems, then on top of that, with all our agent frameworks, the power is enormous.
CN: The Alliance just launched ASI Cloud. What is it, and how is it different from services like Google Cloud or AWS?
Janet Adams: ASI:Cloud is a powerful new platform that enables developers and businesses to access leading open-source AI models through a simple, pay-as-you-go service.
It is a distributed Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and AI service that is around 70% cheaper than hyperscalers like AWS, and you can get smaller packages designed for startups, small businesses, and developers.
It’s also permissionless and Web3-integrated, so it carries all of SingularityNET’s strong privacy and decentralization principles.
We’re also building Large Language Model (LLM) enhancements and security features using our SingularityNET R&D. We strive for this to be the next wave of ASI Cloud.
It lowers the barriers to access by allowing users to only pay for the tokens they use (either crypto or fiat) and you don’t need additional infrastructure.
It also gives away free credits for experimentation. This way, it’s super easy for anyone to start building with advanced AI tools.
CN: Can you explain what ASI Chain is and why it’s such a big deal?
Janet Adams: ASI Chain is my current project. I’ve recently been speaking about it in Singapore with founders, builders, and developers, and everyone seems to be extremely excited about it. Especially because it combines and disrupts three technologies into a single product.
The first tech is Rholang, which allows synchronized node-to-node messaging instead of the usual batch messaging that happens on most blockchains. In doing so, it ensures there’s no backlog, just instant communication.
ASI Chain is specifically designed for these types of interactions. Imagine running agents on the blockchain through nodes that can communicate instantly and efficiently. Well, that’s the first big breakthrough.
The second is MeTTa, which I’m even more passionate about. It is a programming language built from the ground up for the future of AI and AGI that we’ve been developing for the past four years, now being deployed on-chain as a smart contract language. Think of it as the language of thought in programming.
Building a programming language can take an extremely long time, but this one is coming together quickly.
We use an agentic system framework so that these smart contracts don’t just execute simple commands, they actually embed AI directly into the contracts. This way it can facilitate decision-making, reasoning, and multi-variable processing.
With this agentic framework, smart contracts can communicate across nodes, potentially massively expanding blockchain’s capabilities for AI.
The implications for DeFi truly are fascinating. Right now, DeFi is limited and straightforward. But with ASI Chain, agentic frameworks enable peer-to-peer financial systems so that agents and smart contracts can carry out complex financial processes autonomously – all while being fully on-chain, immutable, and secured with zero-knowledge proofs.
Then there’s Mork. It’s connected to our MeTTa-optimized reduction kernel, designed for super-fast graph processing and symbolic knowledge management. It’s highly efficient and ideal for AI, capable of retrieving and processing information at incredible speeds, making it far more suitable for real-world, day-to-day applications.
The ASI Chain on devnet is now live and we’re targeting the end of the year for the testnet release and the mainnet launch in H1 next year.
Oh, and best not forget ASI Create. As a builder platform, it’ll enable users to build and connect agents within an agentic framework. They’ll soon be able to leverage our advanced symbolic AI and other available AI technologies on the broader ecosystem.
When these technologies go live, I’m convinced that they’ll mark a quantum breakthrough of this decade and transform the capabilities of Web3 forever.
CN: Given that you have an expansive background in finance and regulation, how do you ensure this AI tech stays ethical and well-governed?
Janet Adams: Now this is really close to my heart. As someone who spent half my banking career managing $200M projects across seventy markets, and then moving into conduct and regulation, I’ve always had a passion for people, small businesses, and fairness.
I worked in regulation as the Global Head of Conduct at HSBC, and everything I learned there was about ensuring you serve your customers, not taking advantage of them. And it was well fitted, as serving humanity and society matters a lot to me.
I also learned that cutting-edge tools should be harnessed for good. At SingularityNET, that’s precisely how we approach it. Because we’re decentralized, within that framework, we have ethics, checks, and safeguards built into every stage of the process, whether it be data governance or development.
For me, it’s about gathering ethical information from diverse groups, so that when our AGI makes decisions, they’re based on the broadest possible range of human input and diversity. After all, technology should exist to serve the largest number of people, not just profit the rich.
Our main aim is for when we eventually create AGI, its development and governance reflect the diverse needs and perspectives of people from all backgrounds.
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