Near.ai → NEAR Protocol → NEAR AI

At the end of 2017, there was an AI paper that shocked the academic community—NLP & AI Revolution. At that time, 4 of the six authors of the paper went to start their own businesses. I started an AI-related company (later joined openAI), and the other one is Illia, the founder of NEAR AI. We started to get in touch with Illia when we saw this paper. I first went to the Near office in 2018. At that time, in an underground shared space in San Francisco, a group of engineers gathered together to do a workshop. We chatted with the founding team from Ukraine. After a long time, I helped Illia apply for his visa and helped them complete the preparations for more than 4 offline developer events in 3 months.

As a 7-year-old crypto OG project, the two founders of NEAR are well-known in the field of artificial intelligence, including the co-creators of the Transformers architecture Illia Polosukhin, and Alexander Skidanov, a master in the field of MemSQL. Their initial idea was to use computer science students around the world to train models and implement program synthesis. Therefore, NEAR was originally founded as "Near.ai" with the belief that they could not only achieve a research breakthrough in the field of procedural synthesis, but also launch a revolutionary product powered by this technology. (Related interests: IOSG participated in Near’s early-stage investment in 2018)

However, in 2017, the field of machine learning, especially natural language processing (NLP), is far from as mature as it is today, and there are still huge challenges in truly realizing program synthesis and solving practical problems. Therefore, their advisors suggested that they try to apply procedural synthesis technology to solve the problem of developers programming verifiable smart contracts on Ethereum. However, Ethereum at the time still had many limitations, especially in terms of the usability and scalability of microtransactions, and no blockchain or traditional payment system could meet the needs.

Therefore, NEAR spent six years building a blockchain that is both highly scalable and user-friendly, one that can adapt to micro-transaction needs and provide familiar The blockchain for the start-up process solves the problem of cold start and encryptionA series of issues such as key management and account availability. But this has also shifted the market’s positioning from artificial intelligence to a Layer 1 blockchain with unclear use cases. With more and more cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence innovations emerging, including the emergence of computing markets, inference networks, and numerous AI agents, as well as the excellent price performance of high-market cap AI tokens like TAO and WLD, people seem to have forgotten NEAR is the pioneer in this field.

After seven years of development, with the improvement of NEAR infrastructure, NEAR has a blockchain and application build that is scalable, easy to use and develop the ecology of the person. And Illia and Alexander can finally refocus NEAR’s goals toward its original vision of making NEAR AI the center of user-owned artificial intelligence in the next phase of its development. At the IOSG OFR Dubai event in April this year, Illia shared his views on "why AI needs to be open" and expressed his determination to build NEAR into a leading ecosystem for the next generation of artificial intelligence research and application.

NEAR is an AI ecosystem built on the Web 3 track driven by the vision of users having AI ownership. NEAR believes user-owned AI offers developers and users a truly better choice than the popular model of centralized AI controlled by big tech companies. NEAR hopes to maximize the benefits of AI to humans and communities through participation in Web3 and the entire NEAR ecosystem, while minimizing the potential risks of centralized AI.

Considering that the Crypto x AI field is still in its early stages, NEAR's strategy is to plan to enhance the entire Web 3 AI ecosystem from a more non-profit perspective Development, whether through incubators, accelerators, investments, building your own open source AI research centers and tools, or using competitions to cultivate community-driven AI development methods, its strategic goal is to realize that AI results can be truly shared by the community this vision. The improvement of the economic benefits of its tokens is not NEAR’s highest priority at present.

This article will focus on the rearrangement of NEAR in the Crypto x AI track to help everyone better understand its positioning in the Web 3 AI ecosystem.

Source: IOSG Ventures

NEAR Foundation Incubator

In response to this theme, the Near Foundation announced the launch of the NEAR AI x HZN incubator in May, and also established an investment department and a R&D laboratory focused on AI projects.

Near Foundation has selected 11 projects to support. Participating projects in the incubator will receive access to: NEAR's network of AI experts, dedicated technology and token launch support, computing resources and financing opportunities

These projects cover AI. Multiple aspects of the technology stack, including data, models, calculations and reasoning, aim to provide AI users and developers with an open AI solution that can be safely accessed and decentralized, breaking the monopoly of centralized AI service providers.

Highlights from some of the selected incubation projects include:

Hyperbolic: an open access AI cloud platform hosting the latest open source AI models, including Llama 3.1 405B.

Mizu: Launched its beta data preprocessing platform, attracting 20,000 users in the first week

Pond: Launched its first graph neural network (GNN)-based model, using on-chain data for wallet prediction and achieving a 20% prediction success rate.

NEAR x Delphi Labs Accelerator

Due to the good results achieved in the early incubation, NEAR further cooperated with Delphi Labs (another research and venture capital company very active in the field of Crypto and AI), jointly announced the first joint AI accelerator program, a strategic initiative to supportand rapidly scale projects with high potential at the intersection of AI and Web3. The program begins on October 15 and runs through early December.

Selected teams will benefit from comprehensive support, including technical guidance, funding opportunities, and access to NEAR and Delphi's expert networks. In addition, each team will receive a $100,000 investment from the NEAR Foundation, as well as a potential investment of up to $250,000 from Delphi Labs for further incubation or acceleration upon completion of the program. The program will be showcased at an investor-focused Delphi Labs demo day in mid-December. Each selected project will also receive $50,000 worth of computing credits from the accelerator program's advanced computing partner, Aethir. These computing resources will ensure that each team has the computing power needed to develop and deploy high-resource-demand AI models, allowing them to focus on to build projects without being bound by infrastructure constraints.

Source: Near AI Blog

NEAR AI R&D

In addition to funding and incubating other projects, NEAR itself is also conducting a lot of AI research and officially released Near AI at its REDACTED event on November 8 , positioning itself as an AI blockchain and launched three important developments.

NEAR AI Assistant

Near AI Assistant is a chatbot-like assistant that can Answer general questions like "What is IOSG Ventures?" and "What is Near AI?" The AI ​​assistant provides local memory capabilities to each user and is able to be associated with each NEAR account, remembering information during the user's conversations with them, and draw on these memories when interacting with different agents on its platform.

More importantly, it enables non-technical creators and developers to easily do many crypto-related operations, especially those related to cryptocurrency. In operation. With just a few words, users can prompt the AI ​​assistant to complete an action, such as creating a Memecoin image for the user, generating that Memecoinwebsite and upload it to the Pump.Fun platform to realize AI agent issuance of coins.

Access the Near AI Assistant (currently in Alpha) via chat.near.ai Testing phase)

An open source toolset for building AI agents

NEAR also released an assistant API toolkit to help users build, measure and deploy AI agents , and integrate it into specific applications.

Currently, more than 60 agents have been uploaded to NEAR Agents Hub, each focusing on different use cases of Web2 and Web3, such as web crawling, tokens Exchange agents, YouTube transcription agents, and more. Each agent can connect to and call other uploaded AI agents to perform tasks.

In future updates, agents on NearAI will even be able to interact with external services and APIs for transactions.

Access community-built AI research and resources for cutting-edge model development

NEAR believes open source contributions are key to enabling user-owned AI. To achieve this goal, NEAR launched the AI ​​Research Hub, which brings together all the toolsets and infrastructure researchers need to build open source AI, including datasets, models, inference, decentralized storage and computing, and more. An important feature of these open source tools is the benchmarking tool, which allows developers to compare different implementations of agents and models with the same functionality, helping users better adjust and improve their agent and model performance indicators over time.

To ensure the development of the most advanced model (SOTA), NEAR AI Research Hub also uses a competition to continuously optimize the model. Currently, NEAR is conducting an ongoing Model Training Series competition to encourage the community to gradually train larger-scale AI models (from 500 million parameters to 1.4 trillion parameters), with perplexity as the benchmark. These models use the FineWeb dataset and are trained using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and GPUs in NEAR Protocol core nodes, ensuring that the models are both privacy-preserving and monetizable.

Source: app.near.ai/competitions

Obviously, in order to capture the value created by open source contributors, they need to be appropriately rewarded and rewarded. NEAR is already planning a future roadmap to establish a reward and copyright distribution system for competitions and model use.

Conclusion

In NEAR's vision of user-owned AI, NEAR welcomes anyone to contribute, and everyone's contribution will be valued and rewarded. Code contributions aren't the only way to help the community. Answering questions, helping others, and improving documentation are also extremely valuable.

As NEAR continues to expand in the AI ​​field, NEAR has the potential to become the preferred platform for decentralized AI development and provide the next generation of AI-based decentralized applications. (dApps) pave the way.

In fact, we have already seen some AI-related dApps being built on NEAR. For example, a protocol called Bitte is working on decentralized proxy discovery, and its proxy plug-in usage scenarios include NFT minting, cross-chain transactions, etc.

Obviously, there are many innovations in the NEAR ecosystem that are not limited to AI. To explore more projects in the ecosystem, you can refer to a tweet shared by Marcus:

https://x.com/marcus_NEAR/status/1862142775304597635

Currently, NEAR’s AI strategy is in line with NEAR’s There is no clear link yet to how tokens and blockchain are combined, and how value is accumulated for NEAR tokens. However, there may be Web3 dApps developed based on the NEAR AI platform in the NEAR ecosystem in the future. NEAR tokens may be used to reward and motivate users who participate in model training competitions, or as a means of payment for using platform agent services. future, whenWhen users need to call proxy services on the NEAR platform, they may need to pay NEAR tokens as usage fees.

In any case, this AI strategy will greatly promote more users to embrace decentralized Web 3 AI, giving users full control over their own AI future. An important step.