Ben Goertzel

Ben Goertzel is an artificial intelligence researcher, and CEO and founder of SingularityNET.
Early life and education.
Three of Goertzel's Jewish great-grandparents emigrated to New York from Lithuania and Poland. Goertzel's father is Ted Goertzel, a former professor of sociology at Rutgers University. Goertzel left high school after the tenth grade to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Quantitative Studies. Goertzel graduated with a PhD in Mathematics from Temple University under the supervision of Avi Lin in 1990.
Career.
Goertzel is the CEO and founder of SingularityNET, a project combining artificial intelligence and blockchain to democratize access to artificial intelligence. He was a Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He is also chief scientist and chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; chairman of the OpenCog Foundation; and advisor to Singularity University.
Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created Sophia the Robot.
Views on AI.
In May 2007, Goertzel spoke at a Google Tech talk about his approach to creating Artificial General Intelligence. He defines intelligence as the ability to detect patterns in the world and in the agent itself, measurable in terms of emergent behavior of "achieving complex goals in complex environments". A "baby-like" artificial intelligence is initialized, then trained as an agent in a simulated or virtual world such as Second Life to produce a more powerful intelligence. Knowledge is represented in a network whose nodes and links carry probabilistic truth values as well as "attention values", with the attention values resembling the weights in a neural network. Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilistic inference engine and a custom version of evolutionary programming.
The 2012 documentary "The Singularity" by independent filmmaker Doug Wolens showcased Goertzel's vision and understanding of making general AI general thinking.