Web3-AI: Separating Reality from the Hype | European Blockchain Convention

[Music] hi everyone thank you for joining us for what I hope is one of the most exciting topics in these two days uh we're going to talk about web 3 and AI um obviously unless you've been living under a rock for the past 12 to 18 months you will have seen the progression of AI in everyday lives um we went from something that was purely technical for several years to something that was very easy to use for the audiences for 90% of the population and we've seen this now come into the blockchain space and what we're going to talk about today is how AI has come into the blockchain space is it just a hype is this just replacing the blockchain hype with AI hype or are we now talking about something that's long lasting that will create a long-term relationship in every single use case in your everyday life and most most importantly will it help with blockchain adoption joining me today is Johnny cunyu he's advisor of the CEO at therm group we have Aiden kilick who's the president and CEO at high of digital Technologies and we have Whit dmer founder CEO at Delta computes I'd like you first to maybe introduce yourselves introduce your project uh give it a bit of an overview how you got to this space and where the AI and blockchain merges or where just AI merges and comes into blockchain in your current project so I'm the first okay I'm Johnny cordano um ter group is not what you see regularly here at uh at the blockchain convention we are a group from visitor economy from travel and tourism and we build and operate large scale Hot Water Resorts in excess of 1 million visitors per year with palm trees and very very nice water slid so on and so forth so what are we doing here with blockchain nii well uh we're very concerned for a while that means for a number of years about the climate change and we're determined to become carbon negative and we tried to offset our carbon footprint through regular channels and we uh reached to the conclusion that it's not enough so uh researching with other people from University of Sur we got to a new mechanism we call it carbon tokenomics model it's a new way of doing business which will um access the retail financing market for green finance and this project which aims to decarbonize not just us but the entire visitor economy uh needed an infrastructure and the infrastructure which ensures transparency and reliability and security is blockchain and in order to operate at such a scale we needed Ai and I'll tell you more about this project and other projects we're having involving blockchain and AI at the same time hi can you guys hear me in the back yeah okay awesome so my name is Idan gillick I'm the president and CEO of Hive digital so Hive is actually the first public crypto Miner ever it went public in 2017 on the tsxv in Canada and today we're listed on the NASDAQ and the frankb stock exchange so at one point we were one of the world's largest ethereum miners with 120,000 gpus operating in Sweden in one site and today we're a little under 1% of the global Bitcoin mining network with about 50,000 as6 in Canada Sweden and Iceland what's unique about Hive we're an innovation company we're a data center infrastructure company really having run Bitcoin mining as6 and ethereum Mining gpus we've done a lot of different things and after the ethereum merge we actually pivoted to take the gpus specifically the Nvidia gpus and we took those and repopulate them in tier 3 data CS to do AI compute like hardcore actual ual AI compute to power large language models in inference and training so it's a super exciting New Era for Hive uh we just announced a 100 megawatt site in Paraguay as well to expand our Bitcoin mining so yeah we're deep in in mining and blockchain and we're making some waves in AI now partner with Nvidia hello hi everybody um I'm Whit damer the founder and CEO of Delta so um Delta is uh we we started as a data center services and collocation provider for the Bitcoin mining industry and um with the Advent of AI um we have pivoted like many uh peers of ours into providing GPU compute out of our data center so uh they're hybrid use they're all powered on Renewable Power we are in Paraguay where hi just arrived um and is a fantastic jurisdiction also in Brazil where between these geographies renewable energy penetration is over 90% so um yeah the the power behind our our data centers is is a big part of our story and now with AI we've um uh embraced Computing for companies who need to power their their their models but also um the convergence of web 3 we have um for nine months now uh been very deep in the bit tensor ecosystem and um you know doing a lot of different things nonphysical activities um so so software uh digital products uh that are all being incubated uh in the benser ecosystem so excited to talk about that a little bit more on this panel Whit maybe tell us more about how you ended up going into from Pure blockchain into the AI component what was your journey how did it start what was your thought process when you got into it well our Core Business is the the data centers so um I mean we understood AI to be a component of our business um even before GPT came out you know AI was is part of compute for for quite some time now um but uh I think we were surprised on how quickly as everybody was um the advancement of the industry happened after GPT and and so at that point we you know kind of re intensed our focus on serving the industry and how can we play in in AI um and we have a very core or very strong development and engineering team um so we wanted to and and we understood um the commodity business right so like Bitcoin is a commodity um I come from a background of Commodities GPU compute is commodi commoditized as well so um we um leaned in very heavily to web 3 and um the integration of web 3 and AI to uh in and specifically in benser to um leverage you know the compute power that we have to um to to basically in an economic interest to to get more uh Rewards or or a higher return per hour on on the the gpus that we have so um yeah so big part of our business um is has become um working with companies uh traditional data centers who have um uh gpus that you know they might be monetizing on different marketplaces in you know non web3 applications um and managing their their their gpus to get a better turn essentially on the hours so um yeah that's that was um I guess half of you know our pivot into AI is is that part of our business now this like mining as a service um but uh within benser I mean it is just and and and many of the you know uh these these similar protocols there's just so much um you know intellectually stimulating really interesting you know probably very valuable um Technologies products things that are being developed so we've uh got involved in a lot of different things uh apart from mining with with uh on on on benser with gpus you know we're doing things in um Financial forecasting so we have uh Bitcoin forecast models which is very sistic with our business um that are a you know AI time series forecasting models so um that's that's one thing but and we've also gotten into validating on on the the the platform as well well which um you know is um very familiar uh with with a lot of the the our our partners and stakeholders in the the crypto space so yeah it's been um a varied um interesting and and quick nine months and forray into AI uh as for us Aiden was it the same experience for Hive uh it's Iden actually so I it's been actually a longer journey and when we were mining ethereum in September 2022 the merge happened right as we're in the blockchain conference I'm sure a lot of you guys know that ethereum went from proof of work where you use energy and hash power to validate blocks to proof of stake which is a totally different consensus mechanism that's code driven so what we did was we started by repurposing our gpus and installing them in tier 3 data centers with super micro servers which really Unleash the Power of the gpus to perform AI compute now just to gauge the audience put your hand up if you've heard of chat GPT okay now keep your hand no keep your hands up keep your hands up keep your hands up if you know what a large language model is okay good keep your hands up if you know what a neural network is okay good we got a a really good audience here okay good so I'm for the rest of you I'm going to really quickly explain why our Fleet of gpus enables us empowers us to be a leader in the AI space so the whole Magic of large language models is really the concept of a neural network it's from Deep learning it's a you know a facet of computer science so a neural network is many layers right of these matrixes and these matrixes essentally when you pass an a a question through it it does what's called a dot matrix multiplication on that data and gpus happen to have the perfect architecture to do matrix multiplication really really quickly right and that Nvidia used to be you know made cards for gaming for graphics GPU stands for graphic Processing Unit so really what's happened is coincidentally but very fortuitously for NVIDIA the architecture of the chips that they've been building for all these years are perfectly designed to do matrix multiplication which allow large language training and large language inference to occur very quickly with gpus so what we do at Hive is we build clusters of gpus so people that want to rent a large powerful cluster for hours or days or weeks can do that and this is how we're enabling all of this AI compute to actually occur so following that ethereum merge we started with 500 gpus and you talked about Revenue per hour and you know ethereum was a I know this is not an investor conference but as a publicly traded company I can't help talk about profit right so uh ethereum was like four times more profitable than Bitcoin per watt of energy which was amazing right but AI is like 10 times more profitable than Bitcoin mining so when you realize this and when you're in the data center business it becomes a really compelling business case but at the same time you are essentially creating a Bedrock for the next wave of technological innovation right so what we're doing is since we navigated the merge we took our existing Nvidia gpus built clusters in Montreal and Stockholm uh we went from 500 gpus to about almost 5,000 gpus today um we're now planning for next year when nvidia's Blackwell architecture ships to upgrade our data centers to be able to run the world's latest and greatest GPU architecture which is going to be three times more power dense than anything that exists today so you're actually going to have to upgrade the data centers not just running the noes so as the technology advances you need to understand where you vertically integrate your business and again really simply we're a data center business we can can run gpus we can upgrade our data centers for the next generation of gpus and then of course you know continue to mine Bitcoin so it's sort of understanding how you fit in the ecosystem and you can deliver value but also be on The Cutting Edge because whether it's the complication of building these clusters or the complication of Next Generation data center requirements you you really have to innovate right and this is where I think we've done a really great job and my whole team by the way all these hats you see with the bees that's Hive so big shout out to my team from all over the world that flew in from Canada Texas all over put your hands up [Laughter] guys all right and Johnny I know it's a different experience for you you had a different Journey from from the other two because you don't come from blockchain necessarily but you came directly into AI well um we're trying to sort out probably the biggest problem Humanity has which is climate change so if you forget about everything this one is bigger than everything so there are no simple solution and there is no one solution from one field and we understood that very very very early in the process and we knew that we have to have alongside with as people from the Academia and we have some of the brightest Minds from carbon life cycle blockchain artificial intelligence and the university we are working with are in top three I'm saying modestly top three in the world in their respective field so uh very early on we discovered that if we employ blockchain as an infrastructure for example for the business model and for transactions in visor economy of setting the carbon footprint we need a large number of transaction per second and the industry was not delivering that easily so we had to research with Siri Academy of blockchain and metaverse application to find a suitable provider for us and yes we found it a few years back and now it's uh working with us it's radx Foundation it's radx so uh from that we have large amounts of data when the model will mature and we have not just one application for artificial intelligence but multiple applications so when you think that we aim to have green projects how you design and select a green project because a green project storing carbon has to last 100 year what will happen in 100 year who will help us select the green projects then the blockchain we invented a new consensus mechanism which is powered by AI as a subsystem of the entire mechanism we have a carbon footprint calculator for visitor economy and that is part financed half by us half by British government so the state gives us money and we started and we already have the first module of the carbon footprint calculator all the carbon footprint calculators on the market which are looking at travel and tourism are static ours is agile our is capable of adapting of self self-learning because we look at some Services where changing constantly and their conditions so that you need Ai and in fact our ambition is a little bit more than that because having improving through academic research we're in the Prototype phase that we can deliver a new type of doing business incorporating carbon into the business cost of the transactions and raising green funding from ret not from companies but individuals we can expand this model into other Industries into Finance into banking energy whatever so uh our way to AI was not following a hype oh it's a nice word AI I've seen it it's it's a trend today no we research and we're looking for Solutions and when the solutions do not exist on the market and that happened a lot we pushed the brightest Minds in the field to develop for us what we want and we do not compromise I mean when we start looking at blockchains they're saying that's the limit okay the limit is not good enough for us develop more and it's the same with AI so everybody lives in his professional bubble but the business part n should know how to approach the AI professionals the blockchain professional and take them out of their comfort zone and push them more for practical application for real real problems so that's how we got to AI we had real problems and we needed Solutions that's that's a really exciting journey and the fact that you've created everything from the ground up is pretty fantastic to hear you need to have a little bit of patience you cannot do it really fast and everybody wants to rush projects and get fast money no we're we have patient and we want to get the job well done not to come in front of our shareholders investors partners with a let's say half done job to come back to the whole blockchain versus AI it's not AI against blockchain and as you properly brought up Iden uh the AI has been around for much longer than blockchain has it's just been called differently until now it's it was machine learning it was neural networks it was Big Data even at one point uh all of this took decades to get to the point where we are now where we have this Mass adoption and this traction and this usability for everyday operations is that where you see blockchain going as well or is there a limitation that you see with blockchain and it can only succeed with the support of AI well I'm not afraid to say that I'm a little bit biased when it comes to blockchain because I'm I'm a proof of work guy right so we are miners I think that Bitcoin is the world's decentralized energy back currency that is the most secure Ledger on the planet right you have gigawatts of power millions and millions of Asic computers processing 247 all around the world which by the way is then further backed up by replication of approximately 18,000 Bitcoin nodes so you know people might be doing private blockchains for their own internal thing but when you look at like a globally decentralized blockchain Bitcoin is it but I'm a CEO of a Bitcoin mining company so you know of course I'm going to say that now when you talk about AI I think it's worth noting too just for everybody in the audience chat gbt is you know now it's chat gp4 but the first chat gbt came out in 2018 and nobody knew about it back then because nobody really cared it wasn't that intelligent and it was something like you know 100 million parameters right and then chat gp2 gpt2 came out and that was 1.5 billion parameters and then chat gpt3 came out and that was 175 billion parameters and that's when people started taking notice it's like wow this is starting to get smart enough think of every parameter in a large language model is like a neuron in your brain and so chat G pt4 is rumored to have 1.8 trillion parameters right so it's been growing exponentially over the last six years and so as we see that much in the same way that it's it's interesting when you think about the computer right right like what's the direction this is all going you know when IBM first started selling mainframes in the 60s they they sold like five globally because the only people that could afford it were governments and they took up like entire rooms now our iPhones that you're all holding in your hand filming me are more powerful than IBM's computers from whatever 70 years ago the point is we see that large language models as they become more powerful will also be miniaturized so the open- source AI Community is doing a lot of really exciting stuff where meta for example has their open- Source llama models right llama 3 and they have an 8 billion parameter model which isn't quite as smart as Chachi pt4 but it's portable so I think the future is large language models that can live on your phone because when you use Chachi PT all you're doing is you're setting a webbased prompt to their Central centralized servers it's not open source at all don't let open AI the name fool you it's very closed source so we're big Advocates of the open- source AI Revolution where researchers can fine-tune their own models companies can build their own specific models for their own use based on their own data and either make it available to their clients or for their own business intelligence right so in the same way that compute became democratized and miniaturized you can carry it with you anywhere I think we'll see that with AI as well and as for blockchain I think Bitcoin is going continue to grow continue to get adopted and I think the layer 2 technology is phenomenal right I think Lightning's awesome I think all of these aspects of the Bitcoin ecosystem not just miners everything else happening in that ecosystem is phenomenal and it's no surprise that the world's biggest asset managers are taking positions in Bitcoin it's legal tender in El Salvador you've got Trump trump Donald Trump in America running for president bought a burger with Bitcoin last week in New York City he was at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville you know so I think it's a moment in time and Robert F Kennedy Jr by the way he's the original Bitcoin presidential candidate he debuted his campaign in Miami in 2020 it was awesome so bitcoin's a future for blockchain but what do I know yeah here here on RFK Jr his speech in Miami was incredible you should go back and watch that on YouTube and um skip Donald Trump's speech was not quite as keen on and pointed on on the merits of Bitcoin but uh to answer your question I would say um you know it's it's it's not um blockchain or AI or blockchain only blockchain with AI it's it's it's um this isn't this is an and equation right like I think um I'm fully um um believer in blockchain and proof of work um and the value that's created uh with that technology as well as uh proof of stake um uh projects as well and um I think U now these um web 3 AI projects are just another advancement in this technology and um you know it's it's uh I I think it's all about finding you know really valuable uh projects in in this space and um you know I hope that um as this uh as the web 3 um AI space continues to evolve it only adds more valuable products uh into the the global economy that um bring more credibility to the blockchain space um because um I I I think you know where we struggle as an industry is obviously like the projects that are real creating real value versus you know that are just um trying to to make a quick Buck right so um I think I'm a firm believer in in this space the intersection of the two and I think it's only going to help um blockchain and I think it's going to um you know be a savior to be a little um um overreaching with it but uh I I think it's true to some states on on the future of AI I mean there's there's a lot of things that uh these decentralized AI protocols uh can address that the centralized you know Bemo of of the AI that are emerging to dominate AI you know won't uh because of the their um because of their interest so I think there's huge potential for all of them and I'm excited to uh to be a part of it as with Delta um and and see where it leads okay so I my perspective would be a little bit different so my personal perspective I'm a little bit disappointed about the slow adoptation of blockchain Technology into mainstream life of humans I mean it's still early days we still don't have blockchain as a main infrastructure for transactions all over the world in all aspects of human life in corporate governance even one of the colleague co- panelist mentioned politics I'm not into politics but even in casting votes or whatever so blockchain technology should be so much more than what it is today and we are see seeing this in our model so what our carbon toomics model proposes using blockchain in conducting business and impacting everybody's life every day not just some small population of crypto Enthusiast in some parts of the world so blockchain should be everywhere and I agree with them that AI is faster in being deployed around around the world uh it was mentioned Chad GPT yeah it's a generative AI I'm more impressed by evaluative AI an AI which knows how to score and differentiate between very complex things so that's even more complicated and we're working with some people from Oxford who developed evaluative AI so that's a stage higher than generative AI so in short what I think is that we're still early days with blockchain it will become so much more and the application should come not from the industry but I'm looking in the backyard of my own house in business we should engage the blockchain community more and demand more from the blockchain not just to let them in their own bubble and bring new ideas into this bubble fantastic thank you so much we're coming to the end of our panel thank you again for our panelists and uh if you have any questions feel free to approach any of us uh at the end of this panel thank you