PayPal integrated into AI marketplace SingularityNet

Consumers and companies can pay for artificial intelligence services on the SingularityNet marketplace by using PayPal. The financial service provider allows users to buy AGI tokens, which can be redeemed on the AI marketplace. SingularityNet announced the partnership with PayPal in an official press release.

The fact that PayPal partnered with a blockchain company is remarkable. Normally the payment processor doesn’t want anything to do with cryptocurrencies, but clearly PayPal doesn’t considers the AGI token to be a regular cryptocurrency. Following the news, the value of the AGI token increased over 10 percent to $0.023313. The project now has 5 times more trading volume than before the announcement.

The SingularityNet marketplace is currently in beta testing. People can demo for all kinds of services powered by blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. For example, the system can create a summary from a longer article, or it can generate an article based on a bit of input. Other services include a textual summary for a provided video, image segmentation, facial recognition, speech recognition, and automatic topic analysis based on a number of documents.

“The integration of PayPal into the SingularityNET marketplace is a big and important step toward getting wider adoption for the network’s AI services. Going forward you’re going to see more integrations like this — we want to give various classes of users a variety of ways to secure AI services with fiat currencies or with other cryptocurrencies, and even via more creative mechanisms like multi-party barter exchange.”

– SingularityNET’s Chief AI Officer, Cassio Pennachin (Press release November 15th 2019)

Clients don’t see any cryptocurrencies

Clients who want to use a service provided by SingularityNet won’t see any cryptocurrencies. They will be using PayPay to pay for a service. In the background the PayPal payment is exchanged for AGI tokens. These tokens are then used to activate the AI agent on the platform, perform the task, and deliver the results.

This way SingularityNet is approaching mass adoption in a similar way as game designers do. The mainstream consumer shouldn’t be bothered with all kinds of different tokens, wallets and private keys. They should just be able to interact with the service they want to use, the easiest way possible.

“It’s also important for this AGI token powered network to interoperate richly with the rest of the world economy; otherwise, it won’t get the adoption it needs to grow and realize its potential for intelligence.”

SingularityNET CEO, Dr. Ben Goertzel (Press release, November 15th 2019)

SingularityNet isn’t Skynet (yet)

Because of the rise of blockchain technology, digitization, robotics and artificial intelligence, the comparison with Skynet from the Terminator movie franchise is easy to be made. However, SingularityNet isn’t Skynet yet, and Boston Dynamics hasn’t tied its robots onto any AI blockchain service.

At the moment SingularityNet provides services to Domino’s Pizza in Malaysia. The pizza company is investigating whether it can improve its operations using artificial intelligence. For example, the company is looking at tools to test its delivery services, pizza production process and its business as a whole. Delivering pizzas sure doesn’t equal eliminating the entire human race.

However, there’s a reason to keep an eye on SingularityNet after all. This September the company partnered with Cisco Systems. Together they are developing a super artificial intelligence. They call this applied artificial general intelligence (AGI) technologies. In laymen’s terms this means they will create computers that can reason in uncertain situations. For example, they can plan and communicate in a natural language.

AGI is an aspect of artificial intelligence technology that concentrates on intellectual tasks of which humans are capable. Insiders also refer to this as ‘strong AI’. This way computers can come up with a solution even though the outcome is uncertain. For example, AI will be able to string sentences together and then write a novel.

Originally published at NEDEROB.