VERSES Identifies New Path to AGI and Extends Invitation to OpenAI for Collaboration via Open Letter

VERSES Active Inference, Approach to AGI Grounded in Neuroscience and Physics Led by Top Neuroscientist and Chief Science Officer Karl Friston. Company Urges Industry Leaders to Collaborate to Ensure Safety, Scalability and Transparency in Future AGI Systems.

VERSES AI a cognitive computing company specializing in the next generation of intelligent software systems, has penned an open letter and invitation to OpenAI to collaborate on the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

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The open letter, published in The New York Times, outlines how VERSES is pursuing an alternative approach to AGI using Active Inference, a method pioneered by VERSES’ Chief Scientist, Karl Friston. Active Inference comprises a set of techniques and tools enabling the design and deployment of intelligent agents capable of automatically and efficiently seeking out and learning from relevant data, resulting in an auditable and human-explainable decision-making and action-selection process.

VERSES’ latest research results indicate that its Active Inference agents may soon be able to match and surpass the performance of leading AI state-of-the-art approaches based on deep learning while using orders of magnitude less data and fewer computations. The Company expects to share more details and validation tests with partners and the broader community in the coming months. The breakthrough is also anticipated to be integrated into the Genius platform, aiming to empower developers to create agents capable of learning from any dataset, reasoning, planning and adapting. These agents are optimized for energy and computational efficiency, specifically tailored for intelligent computing on the edge rather than solely in the cloud.

VERSES’ invitation to collaborate with the non-profit organization OpenAI stems from OpenAI’s charter, issued in its pursuit of non-competitive AGI development, which states, “If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.” Through the open letter, VERSES invites OpenAI to explore this new path of collaboration, employing its biologically inspired approach. The goal is to ensure that AGI and subsequent superintelligent systems, as emphasized by the G7 and the US Government, can be developed based on established standards. This approach aims to guarantee that safer and more transparent methods underpin the industry’s ambitions and meet society’s needs.

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The Company wishes to explore the potential of Active Inference and its applicability in science and industry, given the significant strides made by prominent large language models such as GPT, LLaMa, BARD and Claude using deep learning methods. However, they encounter challenges in demonstrating generalizability, explainability and alignment—factors the company considers vital to AGI. The company believes that these aspects can be better achieved through its approach. VERSES’ preliminary research results further indicate that its Active Inference-based approach can enable the efficient, explainable and sustainable generation and deployment of intelligent agents at scale.

“The VERSES AI Research Lab has spent years fine-tuning the intricacies surrounding Active Inference,” said Dr. Friston. “By incorporating the Free Energy Principle, a physics-based approach to AI, we are granted the possibility of modeling any physical system as an Active Inference agent that reasons, learns, plans and predicts in real-time.”

Following the Free Energy Principle — which reconciles our brains’ predictions about the world with reality to reduce the differences between the two — Active Inference codifies mathematical principles that explicitly link intelligence, cognition and rational behavior to physical processes at any scale, from macroscopic to microscopic. With this framework, VERSES aims to solve probabilistic AI’s tractability problem, allowing users to design and deploy adaptive, real-time, scalable AI.

“We believe that nature’s blueprint for intelligence offers the best foundation to scale systems to AGI and beyond,” said Gabriel René, VERSES founder and CEO. “A foundation that can enable smarter, safer and more sustainable, standards-based approaches to general and super intelligent systems. Building on this foundation, our latest research has revealed a promising new path toward this goal.”

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