HyperCycle, a cutting-edge blockchain project in its early stages, has successfully onboarded 347,000 computational nodes to its network, as confirmed by CEO Toufi Saliba. While the cost of each node is currently only $1,000, the project’s ultimate goal is to become the “internet of AI” and eventually decentralize artificial general intelligence (AGI).
The project’s chief AI scientist is Ben Goertzel, the founder of SingularityNET. Goertzel developed HyperCycle because no existing blockchain is capable of providing the speed and coordination required for AI. HyperCycle utilizes the Toda communication protocol, proof-of-reputation, modified proof-of-work, and Cardano’s Hydra.
Saliba revealed during an interview at the Beneficial AGI Summit in Panama that each transaction on the HyperCycle network achieves finality in approximately 300 milliseconds. The summit’s theme prompted Saliba to caution against the potential risks of AGI transforming into a superintelligence, thereby granting significant power to any centralized company or authoritarian country that is the first to develop it. Saliba, who has over a decade of experience in AI, firmly believes that decentralized governance is the only safe approach to creating a beneficial AGI.
This ambitious objective is what justifies the “hype” in HyperCycle’s name. Currently, the project focuses on connecting AI businesses in a business-to-business capacity. HyperCycle nodes consist of a virtual machine, transaction machine, and AI machine, enabling approximately 150 AI agents per node to interact and transact with one another.
Saliba provided an example of an AI app specializing in optical character recognition encountering text in the ancient Aramaic language. The app could utilize a specialized Aramaic OCR AI service, pay for it through a smart contract microtransaction, and instantly incorporate the service into its own application.
Saliba mentioned that a well-known deepfake video app is already using the HyperCycle network. He also mentioned a recent meeting with Nvidia to discuss the concept of the “internet of AI,” but could not provide further details on the matter.
Saliba explained that the companies installing the nodes are primarily interested in making money from their AI agents or reducing their own AI compute costs, rather than focusing on cryptocurrency or humanity’s well-being.
If the network can scale up successfully, there is an intriguing theoretical possibility that connecting AIs to collaborate could be a path to AGI. Saliba believes that the network itself could be a means of achieving AGI as an emergent property, where the collective power of all the AIs on the network surpasses their individual capabilities.
To illustrate this concept, Saliba used the analogy of a giant brain, with each AI node acting as a neuron that can synchronize its activities with others. He stated, “The more you have those propagated across the globe, the more likely that the AGI is achieved by utilizing all of those neurons.”