The Singularity Institute Blog

Earlier this year the OpenCog project was launched, with seed funding from SIAI and code and manpower donations from Novamente LLC. OpenCog is a free and open source software project aimed at providing a generic framework for the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) software. The first formal code release is planned for Fall 2008, but the project has already gained considerable momentum. Most notably, through the Google Summer of Code project, Google Inc. has supported 11 student interns to work this summer on OpenCog-related projects. Several of these student projects have been extremely successful, yielding code and ideas that will form an important part of OpenCog going forwards.

Today another major step forward has been been taken, with an aim of pushing the OpenCog project in the direction of truly powerful AGI: the release of a wikibook outlining a design for a specific AGI system intended to be built on top of the OpenCog framework. This system design is called OpenCogPrime, and is heavily based on the Novamente Cognition Engine design under development at Novamente LLC during 2001-2008.

The OpenCogPrime design is proposed along with the hypothesis that, if the design is fully implemented and various important details are further refined, it may be able to form the basis of an AGI system with intelligence at the human level and beyond.

Of course, even in the case that this hypothesis is correct, it is difficult to estimate the amount of work that will required to create a human-level thinking machine according to the OpenCogPrime design. Levels of optimism among those involved with the project vary. My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years. The path from a human-toddler-level AI to an AI operating at the level of an adult human scientist is less clear, and could plausibly be even more rapid … or else much slower, depending on various factors (which are important and fun to consider, but would bloat this blog post too much…).

Clearly, there could be major unforeseen obstacles along the path to creating a powerful OpenCogPrime-based AGI; and it may turn out that OpenCogPrime is not a viable design for human-level AGI, for reasons that aren’t now anticipated by the system architects. But even if this is the case, we are confident that the process of refining, implementing, testing and teaching OpenCogPrime-based AGI systems will have a great deal to teach us about AGI and computing and cognitive science.

Those of us involved with OpenCog are extremely excited about the power of the free and open source development methodology for accelerating progress toward safe, beneficial AGI with intelligence at the human level and beyond. As in the case of Linux and other existing free and open source software projects, there is the opportunity for industry, academia and independent researchers and hobbyists to work together to create profoundly powerful software.

AGI ethics is (of course) at the core of SIAI’s mission, and we are dedicated to pursuing OpenCog and OpenCogPrime development in an ethically sound way. The free and open source methodology has obvious risks attached to it, and also obvious benefits: there will be a great number of intelligent, educated, concerned people looking at the code as it develops, with an eye toward ethical as well as intelligence-level considerations. Assuming OpenCogPrime-based systems successfully achieve greater and greater levels of general intelligence, we are committed to studying, monitoring and experimenting with these systems carefully with a view toward rapidly increasing our theoretical as well as practical understanding of the ethical properties of AGI systems of the OpenCogPrime category.

Onward toward an ethical, beneficial, progressively advancing and maturing artificial general intelligence!