You might not have heard of Dr Ben Goertzel, the CEO of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, and founder of SingularityNET, the world’s first decentralized AI platform, but he’s on a mission to accelerate our progress towards the point in history that is popularly known as the singularity, when AI becomes so intelligent that it surpasses human intelligence and enters into a recursive sequence of self-improvement cycles that leads to the emergence of a limitlessly powerful superintelligence.
The term AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) was invented to describe superintelligence by a group including Goertzel, Shane Legg and Peter Voss when they were thinking about a title for a book Goertzel was editing, in which Legg and Voss had authored chapters. The book came out in 2005 with the title Artificial General Intelligence, and then Goertzel launched the AGI conference series in 2006. (He later discovered that the physicist Mark Gubrud had used the term in an article in 1997, so while it was Goertzel who launched the term into the world and got it adopted, it had popped up online before.)
