Dr. Ben Goertzel
CEO of SingularityNET and the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance

Dr. Ben Goertzel is a pioneering scientist, entrepreneur, and leading global voice in artificial general intelligence (AGI). He serves as the CEO of SingularityNET, the world’s first large-scale decentralized AI platform, and CEO of TrueAGI, which focuses on building practical, scalable AGI systems rooted in decades of cognitive architecture research. He is also Chairman of the AGI Society, the field’s longest-running scientific organization dedicated to advancing general intelligence research, and CEO of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, a multi-project ecosystem committed to developing open, beneficial superintelligence outside the control of Big Tech and nation-states.
Ben coined and formalized the term “Artificial General Intelligence” in his landmark 2005 book Artificial General Intelligence, setting the conceptual foundation for the field long before AGI became mainstream discourse. He has authored over 25 books and 200+ scientific papers spanning AI, cognitive science, complex systems, machine learning, and philosophy of mind. His latest book, The Consciousness Explosion, outlines a vision for the coming transition where humans and advanced machine minds co-evolve toward higher forms of intelligence and experience.
A central focus of Ben’s current work is Hyperon, the largest non–Big Tech AGI architecture and the leading project globally that integrates multiple AI techniques, such as symbolic reasoning, neural learning, probabilistic inference, evolutionary computation, and distributed networks. Hyperon is designed to run on a decentralized, censorship-resistant compute fabric—in stark contrast to the closed, centralized AGI efforts of major corporations.
Throughout his career, Ben has built and led teams across academia, industry, and open-source communities. Prior roles include Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, where he led the development of the cognitive software behind Sophia the Robot (the first robot citizen), and leadership positions across bioinformatics, machine learning, and cognitive modeling labs worldwide. As a public intellectual, he is widely recognized for his thought leadership on AGI safety, decentralized AI governance, crypto-AI ecosystems, longevity science, and transhumanism. He is a frequent speaker at global forums including Davos, TEDx, the Web Summit, The United Nations, China’s Boao Forum, and major AI research conferences.
Outside of research and entrepreneurship, Ben is also a musician. His band Desdemona’s Dream, featuring a humanoid robot lead singer, tours internationally and explores the frontier of AI-human musical collaboration—merging art, embodiment, and generative creativity as another dimension of his lifelong exploration of intelligence.