Web Summit Rio: “It is inevitable that AGI will be a sentient being” – Alexey Potapov, chief AGI officer of SingularityNET

SingularityNET’s chief AGI officer Alexey Potapov has said that the next phase of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI), will attain some form of sentience or consciousness.

Originally published April 18, 2024

Speaking at Web Summit Rio, Alexey said that SingularityNET is working on more advanced cognitive agents that will – unlike current generative AI systems such as ChatGPT – have more human-like memories.

“Such systems will have a long-term memory … episodic memory, procedural memory, declarative memory, and so on. And these components should definitely be connected to reasoning and decision-making processes.”

These AGI agents might not be conscious in the way that humans are, but Alexey explained that ”if something is completely indistinguishable from how it would work, if it has consciousness or sentience,” then humanity will accept these agents as such.

Asked by an audience member at Web Summit Rio’s Q&A stage whether AGI could “kill us all”, SingularityNET’s Vita Potapova – project manager of the company’s open-source AGI platform, Hyperon – said: “I definitely think that there is a possibility. And to make it beneficial to us all, not dangerous, let’s talk, right? Let’s [develop] it together, and this will minimize risks.”

Alexy added: “We cannot run the risk of using AGI as a weapon, and we need to mitigate these risks not by prohibiting the creation of AGI – because it would be very difficult to do this globally – but instead, we need to work together in a collaborative way on our creation of beneficial AGI for humanity.”

Alexey and Vita’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on artificial intelligence at Web Summit Rio, where more than 34,000 people have gathered to discuss the most pressing questions around technology, and to make the meaningful connections that will shape the future.

The sold-out event is hosting a record number of women-founded startups (45 percent) among 34,397 attendees from 102 countries. This record-breaking attendance marks an almost 60-percent increase on the number who attended the first Web Summit Rio in 2023. The floor space at this year’s event has increased approximately 25 percent on last year, but the event was still sold out ahead of the opening day.

Web Summit Rio is the largest international tech event in Brazil. This year’s event has brought together 1,066 startups, 45 percent of which are women-founded. This is the highest ever proportion of women-founded startups at a Web Summit event, and the largest gathering of women founders at an event in South America. These startups are joined by 499 investors; 175 partners, including IBM, Huawei, SAP and Salesforce; 518 speakers from companies including BYD, IBM, Grindr and Nvidia; and 844 members of the media from all over the world.

About Web Summit:
Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

In February, Web Summit held its hugely successful inaugural event in the Middle East. Web Summit Qatar welcomed more than 15,000 attendees and was supported by 100-plus partners, including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. Web Summit Qatar showcased the work of more than 1,000 startups from around the world, and helped introduce them to a network of more than 300 investors in Doha.

Web Summit’s mission is to enable the meaningful connections that change the world. Web Summit also undertakes a range of initiatives to support diversity, equality and inclusion across the tech worlds, including Impact, women in tech, Amplify, our scholarship programme, and our community partnerships.

Useful links
Web Summit Rio website: https://rio.websummit.com/
Web Summit Rio media kit: https://rio.websummit.com/media/media-kit/
Web Summit Rio images: https://flickr.com/photos/websummitrio/
About Web Summit: about.websummit.com