Ben Goertzel

By his own account he was born in 1966 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Carol and Ted Goertzel, both Americans, making him a dual US–Brazilian citizen; in 1982 he left high school after tenth grade to enter Simon’s Rock College at 15 and graduated in mathematics in 1985.⁠[1]

He holds a PhD in mathematics from Temple University in Philadelphia.⁠[2]

Before his executive career he taught mathematics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, cognitive science at the University of Western Australia, and computer science at Waikato University in New Zealand, the City University of New York and the University of New Mexico.⁠[3]

He recalls returning to the US in early 1997 to start the company that became Webmind Inc., aiming to make Internet AI the seed of the “global brain”; he began coding the system in Java that April, co-founder Ken Silverman, a friend since university, took over most programming in September, and seed funding arrived in early 1998. The company built an R&D team in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which at one point had 60 of its 130 staff.⁠[4]

The company closed its doors on April 2, 2001.⁠[4]

The management of Webmind Inc., based in New York and Belo Horizonte, announced that a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in mid-April was extremely likely after an overseas media firm abruptly canceled an expected multimillion-dollar funding round; the R&D division he led had spent three years building the Webmind AI Engine, intended to reach human-level intelligence.⁠[5]

Novamente LLC was founded in 2001; around 2008 it was a software company of 20-plus people headquartered in Silicon Valley with a development office near Washington, DC, whose clients included Northrop Grumman, the NIH Clinical Center and the CDC, and he served as founder, CEO and chief scientist of it and of Biomind LLC.⁠[6]

He recalls that around 2002, while co-editing a book on human-level AI with Cassio Pennachin, he asked friends for a title and Shane LeggShane LeggShane Legg is a New Zealand–born artificial intelligence researcher who co-founded DeepMind with Demis Hassabis in 2010 and is chief AGI scientist at Google DeepMind, with long-standing work on the theory of machine intelligence and the safety of artificial general intelligence.Open the full entry, a researcher who had worked for him, proposed “Artificial General Intelligence”; they used it for the book and he went on to spread the term, while noting that Mark Gubrud had used it in a 1997 article.⁠[7]

The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08) was held March 1–3, 2008, at the FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis; the conference site posted his introductory talk.⁠[8]

Launched in 2008 and led by him, OpenCog aimed ultimately at true human-level AI and offered open-source AI tools and a framework that anyone could use and modify.⁠[9]

Before relocating to Hong Kong in 2011 he was CEO, chairman and chief scientist of Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC in Washington, DC, and earlier CTO of Webmind Inc. in New York.⁠[2]

He was co-founder and chief scientist of Aidyia, a Hong Kong hedge fund start-up seed-funded by venture capitalist Emanuel Breiter, whose trading system found patterns in news, social media and other data and placed orders automatically; it planned to start trading US equities in 2015.⁠[10]

He served as chief scientist of Hanson Robotics, directing software for the Sophia robot and leading the Awakening Health team for its sibling robot Grace; he also chaired the futurist think tank Humanity+.⁠[11]

In December 2017 SingularityNET, the decentralized AI marketplace project he led as CEO, opened its AGI token sale to the public and sold out in about 60 seconds, raising a total of $36 million.⁠[12]

The company said 20,000 registered investors had pledged up to $360 million; its blockchain AI marketplace was meant to let developers offer AI work to buyers such as Hanson for use in robots.⁠[13]

On June 22, 2020, he was the guest of episode 103 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, titled “Artificial General Intelligence,” covering the origin of the term AGI, the AGI community, OpenCog, SingularityNET, Sophia and decentralized mechanisms of power.⁠[14]

He announced the Beneficial AGI (BGI) Summit at the Hilton Panama on February 27–28, 2024, followed by an in-person and virtual unconference on February 29–March 1, aimed at concrete plans for coordinated action toward beneficial AGI.⁠[15]

On March 27, 2024, Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol announced a merger to form the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, combining their tokens into the ASI token; Humayun Sheikh of Fetch.ai would chair its governing council, with him as CEO.⁠[16]

The merger was completed on June 13, 2024, with AGIX tokens migrating to ASI at 0.433350 per token; he called it only the start of a broader movement gathering forces toward beneficial decentralized AGI and superintelligence.⁠[17]

In November 2025 SingularityNET and alliance members released the Hyperon AGI Framework in alpha, with improved versions of the Atomspace knowledge graph and the MeTTa language, alongside the development-stage ASI:Chain network; he said the framework let researchers build toward AGI with deep neural nets, logic systems, evolutionary learning and other approaches.⁠[18]

As of October 2026 SingularityNET’s website says he founded the organization with the mission of creating decentralized, democratic, inclusive and beneficial AGI, and lists him as CEO and chief scientist.⁠[19]

Personal website: Public link: https://goertzel.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/bengoertzel (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoertzel/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

SingularityNET: Official website: https://singularitynet.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Artificial Superintelligence Alliance: Official website: https://superintelligence.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]