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No one knows for sure what it\u2019s going to take to make artificial general intelligence work. But that doesn\u2019t mean that there aren\u2019t prominent research teams placing big bets on different theories: DeepMind seems to be hoping that a brain emulation strategy will pay off, whereas OpenAI is focused on achieving AGI by scaling up existing deep learning and reinforcement learning systems with more data, more compute.

Ben Goertzel \u2014a pioneering AGI researcher, and the guy who literally coined the term \u201cAGI\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200adoesn\u2019t think either of these approaches is quite right. His alternative approach is the strategy currently being used by OpenCog, an open-source AGI project he first released in 2008. Ben is also a proponent of decentralized AI development, due to his concerns about centralization of power through AI, as the technology improves. For that reason, he\u2019s currently working on building a decentralized network of AIs through SingularityNET, a blockchain-powered AI marketplace that he founded in 2017.

Ben has some interesting and contrarian views on AGI, AI safety, and consciousness, and he was kind enough to explore them with me on this episode of the podcast.