Beyond the Monolith: How Decentralized Startups Are Fighting Big Tech for the Future of AGI

Ben Goertzel, CEO of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance and CEO of SingularityNET, views this forecast as “entirely plausible.” Goertzel notes that standard digital financial transactions during peak hours already reach into the millions, even when primarily generated by humans through intermediaries.

The shift to agentic commerce changes the scale by orders of magnitude. “Instead of a single person initiating an action, we have an entire team of agents operating autonomously,” Goertzel explained. “Rather than one entity, we get an entire squad generating transactions.”

Goertzel suggests the solution is not a single, monolithic network, but a system of specialized networks—similar to a modern highway with dedicated lanes for buses, express traffic, and freight. “By separating traffic, we avoid gridlock,” Goertzel noted. “That’s exactly the kind of scalable architecture we need for agentic commerce: a network of shards, where each piece does one thing well and interacts seamlessly with the rest.”

Nevertheless, a resilient ecosystem of startups is launching a tactical counter-offensive. By leveraging agility, niche specialization and open-source collaboration, these smaller entities are betting that architectural diversity and ethical transparency will disrupt the monolithic status quo.

He added that this strategic diversity becomes particularly powerful in the current industry context, where many leading researchers are realizing that simply building larger LLMs will not lead to AGI. “This is something we understood from the very beginning, which has guided our Hyperon approach to AGI and superintelligence,” Goertzel added.

“We need open, decentralized, and democratic methodologies across the entire AI pipeline: deploying and running AI systems at scale, ensuring data is supplied fairly, teaching AI systems broad human values, and making collective decisions about their development.”

According to Goertzel, combining open-source code with decentralized infrastructure and governance ensures that AI remains transparent, widely accessible, and “highly beneficial for humanity and other sentient beings.”