A Platform That Runs AI and Enables AI to Build | Kyle Langham - DFINITY Foundation

pleas welcome to the stage Kyle langum from definity Foundation all right all right thank you thank you appreciate it yeah my name's Kyle angum I work at the definity foundation which is a major contributor to the internet computer protocol I'm here to talk about the concept of a world computer and the incredible value that it's going to bring to um to AI so if this if this term of a world computer sounds familiar it's because it was actually a very common term back in the early ethereum Community like even before ethereum became ethereum it was this idea of a of blockchain enabling a decentralized cloud uh that that was permissionless and anyone could host an entire you know their entire software stack so the idea that the world software could run on blockchain now the ogs of ethereum ended up pivoting their time to Market was really important to them so they went One Direction um but that vision of the world computer lived on there was a an early uh contributor to this idea named Dominic Williams he went on to found the definity foundation with the vision of creating a world computer and uh um and achieved that Vision with the internet computer now it's interesting that uh back in November of last year you're starting to see this talk of revisiting the world computer you see a lot of the uh ethereum OG starting to question um should we go back to this idea of a world computer and I think it's because a lot of people see that the technology is now viable so again the idea of a world computer is a decentralized cloud that you can host any software application on it's uh there's really kind of two main reasons why people are interested in this idea uh reason number one is people look at the centralization that is our internet experience today you can name four companies Amazon web services Google Cloud uh Microsoft Azure Alibaba Cloud those four companies make up the vast majority of what we experience on the internet today uh so we have a high level of centralization in addition to that our internet Tex stack has 40 Years of technical debt and so uh By Design almost our the the internet Tex stack is insecure um and people recognize that blockchain with a consensus mechanism is actually a phenomenal way way to secure software so what is a like what are the features that you would expect from a world computer well if a world computer is going to compete with Amazon web services and Google Cloud it should have a web2 like experience and feature set that is comparable it should speak uh speak https uh without calls so you should be able to do API calls like a seamless software experience for the end user uh it should have incredible compute power it should have a lot of data storage capability and um probably on the web 2 side too it should have a user experience similar to web too when you go to Google and you do a search you don't pay a gas fee and if you do a transaction on Amazon Amazon doesn't charge you the Visa transaction fee and make it apparent to you the idea of gas is is a hindrance to to um to our to our industry so it should have a reverse gas model in addition to all that it should also do web 3 things such as um have uh uh um sovereignty where a dow could actually own the software code uh it should be able to compute crypto and it should actually talk with all other blockchains so this idea of a world computer kind of focuses on the idea of sovereign software which is different than a um which is different than a smart contract because it's can be a full stack application front end backend and data not just a small snippet of code intended to do a token transfer but rather entire software applications and the advantage I I get this question actually a lot people will say you know why why should software be fully hosted on chain why can't we have web two components and um a couple of the reasons one Unstoppable um the you have a permissionless cloud in which anyone can put uh their application on on and and know that it will run the biggest reason though is tamper proof so you get tamper resistance by hosting on a blockchain I mean that's why we do ledgers on blockchains and not on Google spreadsheets is because you can't tamper with the blockchain you can do that same application with software this is a big thing I'm going to talk about Ai and just put that in context about the amount of value AI is going to um hold itself and the fact that it's uh uh that you want that tamper proofness that that resilience to hacks it's worth pointing out uh when you think about the web 3 hacks that we've had in the last couple years by bid is a great example right now all of them almost almost all of them have occurred on offchain components not onchain comp components uh and then there's a couple other reasons uh you know you can keep your dat data private um I'll go into some more reasons later so again I said I'm making the case that ICP is a world computer um what are so the the the technical specs are needed for us to be able to host full application uh full stack applications so right now we can do four gigabytes of heat memory uh that's actually going to go up to 8 gigabytes soon when we roll out a 64-bit environment uh we can this slide's actually already old you can do 500 gigabytes in a single smart contract canister cost is only $5 per gig per year um you can program in a wide variety of languages rust typescript uh solidity if you're an ethereum developer and so on so essentially I mean I'm not saying we're feature compatible with with Amazon web services but what we're trying to do is approach that level to where the vast majority of software applications can host the entire Tech stack on the blockchain um just real quickly one of the interesting things about the internet computer uh and this is going to play a role in the AI part that I'm going to get to uh is that data and logic live together in a single environment um so the concept of a database does not exist I appreciate that um the of a database does not exist in in the ICP world you can engineer a database if you want to but there's really no reason to your data lives as an object within the code which reduces the uh technical um requirements and team a whole host of different verticals are being uh built on ICP uh let's focus on AI so back in 2023 in the summertime a developer in the ICP Community posted on the forums that he got a um uh I think it was a tiny stories llm running fully on chain uh um the llm model fully on chain uh with no web two components at all and that was like an eye opening even for for us within definity it was an eye opening because we had never even thought about the fact that you could host an inference engine on a blockchain on our blockchain and that kicked off a whole bunch of Discovery right so so uh from there we quickly saw um uh an image classification model that got hosted on chain uh a facial recognition model uh and now we're actually moving into a state where uh projects are Lo are running the most advanced llms on chain so uh here's a here's a tweet by anai anai is a leader in in U decentralized AI uh I don't they there're some they've been floating around um here at the uh conference so if you do see them with like a shirt on or something say you can say hi but shortly after deep SE completely tanked the world economy if you remember the when stocks dropped it was like 2 days later they posted that they got deep seek R1 a 1.5 billion parameter model posted fully on the internet computer and running um the reason that they are interested in this because this is a great question like why does AI why should AI run from a blockchain is a a very common question and again if you're asking that question I would repeat well why should we run a ledger on blockchain right it's that same thing um but they see it as data security so they by hosting their llms on chain they can provide a level of data security to their customers and their users model security this is a really big one when you consider the fact that AI agents and AI models in the future are certainly going to be honey pots for um for for uh people to hack and try to steal that value in addition to that you can actually provide cryptographical verification to your users that they're interacting with the model that they expect that they're interacting with and then finally um and I know anai is not as interested in this I haven't seen so far but one of the um really cool things is if you're running your your um if you're running your AI on a world computer that is integrated with all the other major blockchains your AI agent actually can sign transactions on bitcoin ethereum salana um as well as read the entire States from from those blockchains so if you're a big if you think agent to agent transactions are going to become a thing which I think most people are saying that yes my agent's going to interact with your agent and do Financial transactions on our behalfs uh it's almost certainly going to be over crypto rails and security is going to be uh a big big concern there all right so yeah so let's get let's go back like why host AI on chain why host inference on chain it really comes back to again this permissionless this tamper resistance so that you can your your model can have a lot of value and you don't have to worry about security as much as you do on a web two counterpart and keeping your data private um one of the cool things too is we we're finding that it's actually uh computation so running a a ll on a blockchain is computationally more expensive than running it on a big 2 Cloud the replication factor is going to always um mean that however the life cycle of the software of the AI agent we're finding is could be cheaper because of the Simplicity of posting it on the internet computer relative to Amazon web services you're not managing data um going back and forth uh so you um like anai is real big on saying like they're a they can be a smaller Dev team and produce greater results because they're hosting their llms on chain and not on AWS or Google Cloud so that's this again data and logic living together means complexity decreases all right so that's one vertical that I think is really really interesting for the world computer um hosting AI agents there's an entire different vertical that I think this is really where we're going to get into uh reaching out to where where the masses of uh of you know our family and our friends are going to finally start getting on web 3 is this idea of describe to create so uh we at definity have a product that's in development right now uh we're getting ready to release our Alpha release of it called caffeine you can see a picture of it right here it's just a standard uh you know chat to the code interface so you describe the application you want to run it's going to build out the code for you and then put it on ICP the entire the front end the back end and and and the data it's going to put it on ICP for you so really standard thing if you know vdev that's a similar product in the web 2 world likable is a very similar product as well um this is similar to that except for it hosts it on ICP but the key feature there's there's a key Moe that we're going to have in web 3 that they will not be able to replicate in web 2 which is the ability to manage that that application so you built an application in caffeine you launched it you're going to be able to manage the life cycle of that software through that same chat prompt so three months later you come back and your users have requested a change to your application or your designer says I hate the background or I hate this way that the user flow is you're just going to go back to your chat prompt describe the changes you want it's going to redeploy that codee on the internet computer and update your application Live and it's going to do so with orthogonal persistence so if you know what that term means um it essentially means that the data that your users have already entered into your site that's being stored in your smart contract it's not going to drop out and that's really a moat that we're going to see caffeine has that it's going to be very very very challenging for web 2 similar web two applications to copy and that really comes back to the unique architecture of of um ICP so what does this all mean um we see caffeine as a product that basically unlocks web 3 development for 8 billion people now as simple as describing a what your want your application to be anyone will be able to come in and and launch an application let's say like you're sitting around with your friends and you guys want to do a a pool based on you know some you know I don't know some a random generator for who has to pay the bill at dinner instead of downloading an app to do that you could actually just describe it and in let's say 30 seconds 60 seconds you'll have your application Live on chain and then you can use it if you don't need it anymore you can just kind of let it drop off if you want to keep evolving it over time and maybe commercializing it you can keep doing that and so that's the vision that we see is that 8 billion people are going to be exploring building web 3 apps at that time and we we we also believe that this is going to be an on uh um an on-ramp for people to get into web 3 development so even though caffeine can build the code for you and manage that code for the life cycle we believe that there's going to be people who see commercial benefit in their application and what they need to do is differentiate their chat their their their application in a way that somebody else can't come and do the exact same chat prompts and produce a similar app and at that point they're going to take controller their code with which a caffeine allows you know it's a your C your application is a smart contract on icps so sovereignty is a really big thing you'll be able to take control of your your smart contract and then you can change the code and and and do whatever it is that you want to do if you want to now start pivoting into like Bitcoin or ethereum um you'll be able to do that and so in our minds this is this is how we onboard 8 billion people into crypto they're going to be using applications that they don't even realize are running on crypto rails that's the point you when you're on the internet you don't know if the website you're accessing is Google Cloud or Microsoft orur and you don't care and you really shouldn't care and so we think that this is how we'll get to that stage in in this life cycle where um where users are using crypto and they don't even know it so that's my time um if you're interested in partaking in this either developing or being part of the community uh you could scan that QR code it's going to take you to internetcomputer dorg um and I hope to see you out there uh running some AI agents thank you thank you