Welcome to 2024: The Year Computing Changes Forever

VERSES closed out 2023 with an important video titled, The Year in AI 2023. If you missed it, take a look here:

What a mind-blowing year it’s been for Generative AI. We’ve all seen the multitude of 2023 wrap-up posts recapping the staggering growth of these amazing tools. I, for one, cannot imagine going back to working without them. The amount of time tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Fireflies, and others have saved me in tasks I can now perform in minutes that would have taken me days to complete beforehand. It really has been a great year for productivity!

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language.

And nest year’s words await another voice.” - T.S. Eliot

2023 is behind us now, and standing here on January 1st, 2024, a new year awaits with new technological developments that we can only imagine. These next years are primed to change the experience of living a human life on every conceivable level.

One change we are definitely going to see this year is technology, which is altering everything we know about computing and the relationship between humans and machines. I’m referring to technology beyond the tools of Generative AI. The actual framework of computing is changing, and VERSES AI is leading that change.

At the end of November 2023, at the DealBook Summit, NVIDIA Founder Jensen Huang said:

“You can’t solve this new way of doing computing by just designing a chip. Every aspect of the computer has fundamentally changed. And so everything from networking, to the switching, to the way computers are designed, to the chips themselves, all of the software that sits on top of it, and the methodology that pulls it all together — it’s a big deal because it’s a complete reinvention of the computer industry. And now we have a trillion dollar worth of data centers in the world, all of that’s going to get re-tooled. That’s the amazing thing. We are in the beginning of a brand new generation of computing. It hasn’t been reinvented in sixty years. This is why it’s such a big deal. It’s hard for people to wrap their head around it, but that was the great observation that we made. It includes a chip, but it’s not about that chip.”

As we begin this new year, it’s important to understand that Generative AI is not in competition with VERSES AI. They are entirely different kinds of AI, and they serve a different purpose. Generative AI is a tool within the framework of the next era of computing, and VERSES has built that framework.

The next era of our internet — a common global network linking all legacy, current, and future technologies together with a common language for all, VERSES built the new protocol (HSTP and HSML) for it four years ago. Then they donated it to the public, because no one can own the internet. But they knew it was necessary for technology to be involved in this next era of computing. They knew it was necessary to establish a world model of real-time context, interoperability, interaction, and perception for building the AI technology of their vision for the future. At that time, the IEEE (the world’s largest core standards body) declared the Spatial Web Protocol “A Public Imperative” — their highest designation. The global core standards — socio-technical standards — for this new network protocol have been in development with the IEEE in the years since.

In the meantime, VERSES has built the first platform to facilitate the world’s interaction within this new network — a network of shared intelligence powered by AI that perceives, learns, and acts on the world following the very principles of biological intelligence.

It’s been a year since I published the first article of a Series titled “The Spatial Web and the Era of AI — What is Active Inference?” on December 30, 2022. In Part 1 of this series, I began to introduce Active Inference AI to my readers, explaining how it differs from Deep Learning. In this particular article, I touched on the VERSES’ AGI roadmap, ending the article with this:

“Active Inference AI inside of Genius™ has access to the entire Spatial Web with IoT sensors and cameras and all context markers attached to all objects within all space and time. This AI becomes an ecosystem of Intelligent Agents that are all interoperable over HSTP. This Collective Intelligence is trained on realtime data and evolves making decisions and updating its interior model based on what is happening NOW, not on historical datasets.

This is the missing piece of the data puzzle that gets us to Artificial General Intelligence. We now have the world model, and we now possess the ability for continuous and adaptive context markers enabling a cognitive model of this world and the ability to compute awareness.

“For the first time in history, starting now, we have the roadmap. AGI is now possible.” — Dan Mapes, President, and Co-Founder, VERSES AI, and Director of The Spatial Web Foundation”

And here we are one year later…

VERSES is coming in hot, announcing its AGI breakthrough just days before Christmas, along with its Genius platform and technology rollout timeline for 2024. After the past couple of years of private pilots and international programs, they’ve been teasing out announcements of their initial very strategic Beta platform partners every week during the last couple of months of 2023. So far, they’ve announced NASA, Volvo, Cortical Labs, Nalantis, and SimWell, with more announcements to come on the first of this year. If you aren’t familiar with these companies, look them up. I think you’ll start to see the bigger picture unfolding.

This is HUGE people. Computing is changing on every basic and fundamental level. Generative AI is one piece of that computing puzzle. It’s a massive tool in this next era, but it’s not the framework for computing itself. What VERSES is building IS that framework, and the AI they are building will be a kind of overseeing AI for all the technology within this shared intelligent network of computing. A kind of AI that mimics biological intelligence. A safe AI that is programmable, explainable, trustworthy, and governable. One that safeguards our privacy on a computing network that solves the biggest problems and threats within the world wide web. This is AI that can be trusted to run mission-critical operations for smart city infrastructure, the supply chain, hospitals, airports, and so much more: A nervous system for the network, a nervous system for the planet.

And one of the best parts: this is AI that is energy efficient in the same way as the human brain. The need for super-powerful processing chips will remain for Generative AI tools but will not be necessary for the distributed intelligence across this expanded global network. Active Inference AI offers a path to intelligence that minimizes complexity and energy, promising a profoundly scalable and cost-effective path to Artificial General Intelligence. By mimicking biology, we can nurture AI that thinks and learns while protecting the planet.

2024 is gearing up to be a defining year in history, and I can’t wait to see how it all unfolds.

Explore the future of AI with Active Inference and gain insights into this revolutionary approach! Visit my blog at https://deniseholt.us/, and Subscribe to my channels on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and more. Subscribe to my newsletter on LinkedIn, for more ground breaking content.

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