Ben Goertzel
American computer scientist and AI researcher
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Through Artificial intelligence, Blockchain and Robot
Early life and education
Three of Goertzel's Jewish great-grandparents immigrated to New York from Lithuania and Poland (in the Russian Empire). Goertzel's father is Ted Goertzel, a former professor of sociology at Rutgers University. Goertzel left high school after the tenth grade to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Quantitative Studies. Goertzel graduated with a PhD in mathematics from Temple University under the supervision of Avi Lin in 1990, at age 23.
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Career
Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains. He is a leading developer of the OpenCog framework for artificial general intelligence.
Funding and correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein
Goertzel maintained a long-running funding relationship with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Goertzel has said that he first knew Epstein in 2001 and later reconnected with him in 2008. An online résumé formerly maintained by Goertzel stated that Epstein provided him with a $100,000 research grant in 2001. Emails reviewed by Business Insider showed that Epstein agreed to provide at least another $100,000 between 2008 and 2018, although the publication could not determine how much of that money was ultimately received. A South China Morning Post investigation found that Epstein committed at least US$113,000 to support OpenCog-related work between 2010 and 2015, helping Goertzel qualify for at least HK$8.9 million in Hong Kong government grants.
Goertzel continued communicating with Epstein after Epstein's 2008 conviction. In an email written as Epstein was preparing to serve his sentence, Goertzel wrote that, based on his understanding, the girls involved were "old enough to know what they were doing" and questioned society's "moral right" to imprison Epstein. Goertzel later congratulated Epstein following his 2010 release from jail.
Goertzel repeatedly sought additional funding from Epstein for artificial-general-intelligence research. In 2011, he asked Epstein to fund half of a proposed $3 million, four-year AGI project involving virtual agents and humanoid robots, describing the proposed effort as the "Sputnik of AGI". In 2013, Goertzel approached Epstein regarding funding for an AGI "toddler robot" project. Goertzel later told Coda Story that the project was never sexualized and said that his discussions with Epstein about measuring the intelligence of robot toddlers concerned cognitive testing rather than sexuality.
In 2015, amid renewed press coverage concerning allegations involving Epstein and Prince Andrew, Goertzel expressed sympathy to Epstein's associates over what he described as negative publicity and requested $25,000 for an OpenCog-related project. After Epstein agreed to the payment, Goertzel wrote that he hoped their discussions could resume after the "moronic media shitstorm" had passed. Their correspondence continued through at least 2018, when Goertzel invited Epstein to an artificial-intelligence and blockchain event in New York.
In 2026, Goertzel said that accepting Epstein's funding had been a mistake and that he regretted failing to investigate Epstein's conduct more thoroughly. He said Epstein had misrepresented his prosecution to him as politically motivated and involving a consenting adult, and stated that he had not known the extent of Epstein's sexual abuse. Goertzel separately described his earlier comments concerning Epstein's victims as "regrettable and unfortunate in hindsight".
Sophia the Robot
Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while computer scientist Yann LeCun, then Meta's chief AI scientist, made several unflattering remarks including calling the project "complete bullshit".
Views on AI
In May 2007, Goertzel spoke at a Google tech talk about his approach to creating artificial general intelligence. He defines intelligence as the ability to detect patterns in the world and in the agent itself, measurable in terms of emergent behavior of "achieving complex goals in complex environments". A "baby-like" artificial intelligence is initialized, then trained as an agent in a simulated or virtual world such as Second Life to produce a more powerful intelligence. Knowledge is represented in a network whose nodes and links carry probabilistic truth values as well as "attention values", with the attention values resembling the weights in a neural network. Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilistic inference engine and a custom version of evolutionary programming.
The 2012 documentary The Singularity by independent filmmaker Doug Wolens discussed Goertzel's views on AGI.
In 2023, Goertzel postulated that within "the next few years" artificial intelligence could "probably obsolete [and replace] maybe 80 percent of jobs that people do, without having an AGI, by my guess. Not with ChatGPT exactly as a product. But with systems of that nature". At the Web Summit 2023 in Rio de Janeiro, Goertzel spoke out against efforts to curb AI research and that AGI is only a few years away. Goertzel's belief is that AGI will be a net positive for humanity by assisting with societal problems such as, but not limited to, climate change.