SingularityNET’s founder Ben Goertzel told the On The Margin podcast that he refuses to surrender control of his AGI project to venture‑capital firms, arguing that artificial general intelligence is too critical to be monopolized.
Open‑Source Vision for AGI
Goertzel, who popularized the term “artificial general intelligence” and led the development of the Sophia robot, maintains that the core code powering AGI should remain free and open source. He believes that open access prevents any single entity from dictating the direction of the most consequential software humanity will ever create.
Artificial Superintelligence Alliance Token Merge
In 2024, SingularityNET joined forces with Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol to establish the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, a coalition that combined their native tokens into a unified FET token. Ocean Protocol exited the alliance in late 2025, leaving SingularityNET and Fetch.ai as the remaining participants.
Market and Investor Implications
While OpenAI and Anthropic have attracted tens of billions of dollars and keep their leading models behind proprietary walls, Goertzel is wiring his AGI work to a blockchain network owned by its users. He warns that publishing code alone does not solve accessibility issues if the required data and compute demand hyperscaler‑level server farms, a barrier that could limit investor enthusiasm for open‑source projects.