370 thousand nodes on hypercycle AGI can fight the threat to humanity.

Hypercycle, an early-stage peerless blockchain project that connects artificial intelligence (AI) machines to share resources, has registered 347,000 computing nodes for the network, CEO Tofi Saliba said.

Each node currently only costs about $1,000, so this isn't a huge dollar value, but the project is set to become the “Internet of AI” and one day artificial general intelligence (AGI) is decentralized.

SingularityNET founder Ben Goertzel is the project's chief AI scientist, which he developed because no existing blockchain could provide the speed and coordination needed for AI. HyperCycle uses the TODA communication protocol, reputation verification and enhanced proof of work, as well as Cardano's Hydra.

“By the way, each and every transaction is going through in 300 milliseconds,” Saliba told Cointelegraph in an interview at the Beneficial AGI Summit in Panama this week.

Picking up on the theme of the conference, Saliba warned that AGI could transform itself into superintelligence.

“It's the worst thing that's happened to humanity,” said Saliba, who has worked in AI for more than a decade and is convinced that decentralization is the only sure way to create useful AGI.

So that's a very ambitious goal that justifies the “boost” part of the Hypercycle name. For now, AI is a business-to-business play focused on connecting businesses. Hypercycle nodes contain a virtual machine, a transaction machine, and an AI machine that allow an average of 150 AI agents to communicate with each other per node.

Saliba used the example of an optical character recognition (OCR) AI application that deals with 3,000-year-old Aramaic text. A specialist in Aramaic OCR can call an AI service, pay through a microtransaction via a smart contract, and immediately use the service as part of its own application.

He claims to have a known large deep fake video app using the HyperCycle network. In a recent podcast, he revealed that he met with Nvidia to discuss the concept of “internet AI.” He told Cointelegraph that he could not comment further on the meeting.

Saliba explains that the companies installing the node don't care about crypto or saving humanity, they want to make money from their AI agents or reduce their own massive AI computing costs.

“People don't care about decentralization. Most of these companies are existing AI companies. All they care about is, ‘Show me how to reduce my $200,000 bill to $120,000.'

If the network can grow — and that's an open question because it's relatively new — one interesting, but as yet entirely theoretical, possibility is that connecting AI to concert itself could be the path to AGI. Saliba believes that the sum of AIS on the network is greater than the parts of the network as a means of acquiring AGI as an emergent asset.

Saliba used the metaphor of a giant brain, where each AI node is a neuron that can fire together. “The more you have scattered around the world, the more likely you are to get AGI using all the neurons,” he said.

“So, with that approach, the possibility of the whole world moving into AGI as one entity is much greater.”