Building Web3 Apps of the Future with User-Owned AI - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

I'm Alex I'm one of the founders of near uh and uh let's talk today uh about artificial intelligence given it's uh the year 2024 uh some of you might know many of you don't uh that uh back in 2017 near started as a AI company uh both myself and IIA we coming from AI backgrounds Ilia is one of the seven people who created the Transformers the technology that is powering today uh the artificial intelligence uh and uh it's interesting to look at the artificial intelligent uh intelligence through the lens uh of the bigger vision of what near is trying to achieve uh near is trying to build uh the world in which people are in control of their data assets and power of governance uh and if you think of every technological Revolution that has happened in the past decade uh it could be social networks mobile phones uh right sharing uh every single breakthrough that happened with a single exception of blockchain has resulted uh in a small number of large profit profit seeking corporations fully capturing uh the value of the technology and without an exception that always means uh collecting user data processing it monetizing it selling it uh and the current path of artificial intelligence is exactly the same uh today the tier one uh technology is fully controlled by small number of entities it's open AI entropic Google uh and uh as they uh establish themselves as the leaders in the space all the attention all the user data goes into uh those silos uh user data helps them uh build better and better models and eventually it gets harder and harder for open source community to challenge the status quo uh and to contrast against this future uh where artificial intelligence is fully owned and controlled uh by large by large corporations uh we have this concept uh of user own AI the future in which artificial intelligence is in the hands of users and the society uh we it's a large multidisciplinary effort which includes uh research applications and deployment of an artificial intelligence in the way at the end of the day uh benefit Society um I want to talk about two aspects of it uh that uh we work on right now uh in the context of near one is uh finding a sustainable way uh towards uh the future in which as open AI anthropic and others continue creating larger and more powerful uh models and Technology uh open source Community can keep up uh and continue uh being competitive uh we are somewhat uh right now we are in a moment in time when it is somewhat the case right Facebook has been pushing the uh open source technology forward however you really don't want uh open source Community to be fully dependent on Facebook which is not necessarily known as the company uh that uh is uh not building World Gardens uh and uh even in the world in which we do have have uh artificial intelligence in the open source that is competitive uh with big players it is important to have ways of deploying it in such a way that users are still in control of their data even today when we do have uh large language models by Facebook uh by mistal and others uh it is almost impossible to deploy them in a way uh where data does not go to some centralized entities that provide inference Services uh and uh at the core of every um of every artificial intelligence systems there is large base model right it could be llama it could be GPT it could be clae uh and training those base models is extremely expensive and as a society we need to find a way uh to Contin to continue creating those models as the uh uh big players uh continue running away from the open source and today training a model on the of the size of you know gp4 or clae requires you having something on the order of tens of thousands of h100s very expensive gpus in a single cluster with infinite band uh something that very few entities in the world can afford uh and something that is inherently impossible to do in a decentralized manner right because it has to be in a single building owned by a single entity uh and uh that is a largely unsolved problem today uh and near is positioned uh to solve it uh much better than almost any other entity if you can if you compare near against any entity outside of web three space uh think of mistal stability um it is extremely hard to build those models in a way that you can uh in a way that you can deploy them uh in an open source way uh in the way that benefits Society but you can monetize them uh uh to have resources to continuously create those models uh every year with new and new uh models coming from the big players uh and this is something that web3 generally has a solution for web3 is very good at building at orchestrating pulling together massive amounts of resources from various people uh creating value based on those resources and then Distributing back value to people who contributed uh so this is something where we have massive advantage over uh Web Two um players uh and if you compare against web three uh other entities we have again an advantage that uh both myself Andia we're experts in the field so we have people who actually understand uh very innately what they doing and that's very important uh for any effort for people to know what they doing uh who spearheaded uh and generally if you talk if you go and find your friends in artificial intelligence space space talk to them about crypto they don't care about crypto and don't know much about crypto and uh it is important for them to work with people they know people they respect and this is where having someone like Ilia who is the creator of Transformers is a huge asset because people want to work with people like that uh under the same roof so that's long term uh as I said largely unsolved problem but we're investing massive resources into um uh into building ecosystem and uh driving research to make this a reality uh in the short term uh where we do have Lama 405b today it doesn't seem like any larger model is about to land uh we need to power the existing open source ecosystem to get as much as possible uh from the resources we have today right and we invest heavily into um building uh an empowering ecosystem projects that work on uh uh decentralized storage on U uh data all all aspects of data data monetization networks uh synthetic data data annotations um all of that allows you today to create significantly more powerful systems uh through fine tuning through building agents uh that's a very active area of research uh and web 3 here is a very powerful tool for all those companies uh to orchestrate uh value transfer to have the single uh point of Truth uh for for things like licensing for things like uh uh Distributing uh access to the uh to computer Etc uh and we have a very large uh e e system of projects within the near ecosystem uh that work on every single aspect uh of this big picture uh and we're building a massive uh uh INF infrastructure and the ecosystem for people to collaborate uh to have a single place uh to single single decentralized place uh where the resources uh are available where people can exchange uh data compute models uh in value uh and I want to um sh gear slightly here uh I have a little bit of time and I want to talk about the second aspect uh that I mentioned early on uh about uh deployment of uh systems in a way that uh keeps people in control I want you to show a quick demo um a quick video uh that is a uh that's an agent that was built by uh one of the one of my colleagues uh over the course of uh one week uh it's if you've seen an uh service called web Sim uh this is inspired by web Sim and largely follows the same formula uh you see here uh someone prompting to build a uh uh an application that shows all the pools on ref Finance uh and what happens under the hood is that it's a an agent that has access to uh metadata of every single contract and it is powered by um Lama 405b and it allows you to build uh fully functional applications effectively on the Fly this is a real-time video uh every request goes to 405b uh decentralized hosted by hyperbolic uh and you can see how you can effectively very quickly iterate uh on changing little things uh right so like here you can see the first prototype that the model Built For You of of uh application showing you all the pools it shows contract names which is not extremely helpful uh and the user is uh requesting to uh instead show token names and metadata so as I said it has access to uh AI every contract uh to the uh function signatures to uh uh the format of the return value so it can easily fetch any data uh from chain and um this is not uh if you follow AI space this is something that has been happening uh it is not particularly groud breaking groundbreaking demo web Sim uh that uh that was the inspiration for this tool can do uh more complicated things because it is powered by clo a more powerful model but something I want to I want you to think about here is generally in the web three space uh big part of the effort was building applications building tools for people where they will be in control of their assets like right like think Unis swap uh where you're in control of assets you're exchanging right think of tornado cache uh where you're fully in control of the information about your data transfers all of that uh is uh only meaningful uh if you are sufficiently technologically advanced to use them directly right but this is not how people interface people interface through every application today using websites using applications and our uh generally the infrastructure on top of which we're building is built in such a way that uh any application any website uh that you using as a user are always you always trust uh the distributor of that application right if you go to Unis swap.com you always trusting that Unis swap as the entity that deployed the website is not doing something weird with your assets as you connect metamask if you go to tornado docash you always trust the developers of that website that they will not actually save the information about your transaction when you're sending it uh and I just want you to uh think about the future in which uh none of that is a problem anymore because instead of uh uh you using applications built by someone else where you have have to trust them uh there is no such thing as Distributing applications anymore right the applications are built on the spot as users uh have a use case right so instead of downloading or like opening Unis swap.com you just go and you say an intent uh you're saying hey guys I want to swap one token to another and the application is built on the fly so that future is very close uh right if you think uh if you were following what's happening on the screen effectively in under 5 minutes it builds a fully functional application uh that uh fully functional pool Explorer for a amm uh and using similar prompts you can build an interface which will allow you to swap tokens which will allow you to to make multi-step uh transactions that go through multiple contracts uh in a sequence uh and the most important thing that none of the things that was typed require any technical knowledge right so any person without any technical knowledge who understands what they want to happen uh can use a technology like that uh in the future to build applications on the spot um for their particular use case uh okay so let's let's switch back to the slides uh and briefly talk about the implication uh of this right so uh as I mentioned so this is one of the steps and one of the things uh in which artificial intelligence will be changing our lives uh and one of the ways to deploy applications and usages of AI in the way way that is respectful of user privacy uh and we investing very heavily uh in this direction we're building what is called AI developer uh to effectively Empower people uh to build applications uh for their particular use case and uh it involves uh the demo I was showing you was a a demo of the front end we have a very strong ecosystem uh company that builds uh uh the same agent for middleware uh we building the same agents for smart contracts so you know one year from now uh every single person will have power and capacity to build arbitrarily complex complex applications on blockchain deploy them uh in the way uh that is respectful of user privacy uh and that's a that's an exciting future to be in uh and I wanted to close with u um mentioning that if you want to know more we will have a large conference in benok right before Defcon uh where we're going to be diving deep and having demos and you will be able to play with all of that life um so yeah that's going to be fun time come join us in bangok uh in November thank you