Introduction

In the recent past, unprecedented economic growth and social prosperity resulted from enhancing human labor through the use of machine power [1], and increasingly complex and abstract notions represented the primary catalyst of progress. The prosperity of human civilization correlates with the capacity to easily manipulate information-dense structures. Today, humanity is currently witnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a transition stage which is pushing things towards the era of cyber-physical social systems [2], [3]. In this dynamic context, analysing and controlling the complexity of the information systems becomes a burden, a challenge, and a priority. Alongside the growing complexity of these systems, the data also becomes the new oil [4], with those who have the tools to create, extract and understand it gaining a significant advantage over their competitors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the enrichment of machines with human-like intelligence. Concurrently, intelligent machines are built to augment and enhance human capabilities. AI drives the transition to a new type of society in which intelligence is the governing factor, as well as a new vehicle for exchanging value. Any progress made in this area has a disruptive potential on everything [5], [6] by addressing the hardest problems we are currently facing, such as: climate change [7], [8], the energy crisis [8], disease-fighting [9], etc. The abstraction layers, tools, products, and ecosystems that are currently being built, improved, adapted, or redesigned are the real trendsetters which will significantly drive the revolution forward [10]. There is a growing global community of AI promoters: developers, academic institutions, corporations, small companies, and government initiatives [11], [12] that are continually innovating and solving real and complex problems. Unfortunately, however, their innovation is not being leveraged at scale, because they choose competition instead of cooperation. Big tech companies and a handful of well-funded startups overwhelmingly set the direction and future of AI by building moats around their technologies and hindering future innovation. Since the current state of affairs implies that prevailing AI ecosystems exhibit severe limitations, particularly concerning fragmentation, isolation, and lack of an environment to stimulate evolution and massadoption, the only real path to growth is to create the Internet of Artificial Intelligence (IoAI). IoAI is an ecosystem that encourages internal coordination and cooperation among participants, rewards the real creators, motivates the contributors, and fosters seamless integration with well-established and emerging businesses. The following chapters of this paper present state of the art in AI ecosystems, the challenges, the next steps, and the Openfabric architecture as an environment with the potential to move things forward.