Ben Goertzel is the Chairman at the AGI company Novamente, and founder of the AGI conference series.
Goertzel held the title of "Director of Research" at the Singularity Institute in 2008 while SIAI and Novamente funded the AI project OpenCog. Goertzel is currently an advisor for SIAI. He notably disagrees with SIAI's arguments regarding the need for Friendly AI.
Goertzel has responded to Eliezer Yudkowsky's Coherent Extrapolated Volition with his own variation of the idea, Coherent Aggregated Volition.