Building with AI and Web3 is easier than you think

Think back to middle school writing prompts. Describe your favorite cookie.

Your teacher asked you to write to an alien who has never encountered a cookie before. This means touching all of your senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. You may not have realized it at the time, but it's actually quite difficult to explain something in a way that gives people a clear picture.

Meet Mateusz Pagani, founder and CEO of Venture Miner. Mateus is a man with light caramel skin and dark brown hair. His hair is cut close up, but you can see that it's curly. He has a dark brown, almost black beard, which is connected to a mustache. His eyes are dark brown behind thin wire glass. His lower lip sticks out a little more than his upper lip, giving him a confident, but not arrogant look.

Can you picture him yet? How confident are you?

Oh yeah, he's Brazilian.

Understood?

Let's take a look at what Mateus Pagani really looks like.

Is this what came to mind when you heard my explanation? Doubt it. When I said he was Brazilian, did you put bright colors and feathered accessories on him? Something like this?

If so, check not only your own biases but also that you are thinking like an AI. This came up from ChatGPT's prompt, “Some Brazilians are having fun.” During the AI2Web3 Bootcamp in New York in early December, Mr. Pagani shared this example, and others spit out by our generative AI, such as Italians sitting around a long table in multiple generations and making pizza. I enjoy eating food).

Run by Pagani and Build City, this bootcamp brings together 59 participants of all skill levels to learn how to combine two of the most talked about (and often misunderstood) technologies to create useful products and services. I learned how to create. Pagani used a version of a middle school challenge to explain how and why AI has made the giant leaps that have kept us all excited and nervous over the past few years. Previously, only text data was primarily used to train AI, but as the exercise highlights, that is being pushed to its limits. However, combining textual information with visual data provides a more complete picture.

And understanding this, getting hands-on experience with both AI and blockchain technology to understand its core components was the purpose of the bootcamp. For Pagani, these skills will be immediately useful to almost everyone, including engineers, technology users, journalists, artists, and doctors.

“We want talented people from all backgrounds to join us and work on AI and Web3, because their multiple perspectives will bring together specialized Web3 and AI expertise. It allows us to discover new use cases that we would never have thought of by thinking alone,” said Pagani. “There are now tools that make it easy for non-technical people to build functional applications and systems using just plain English. The key is to bring together passionate people who are interested in problem-solving, with the right education. With this combination, all you have to do is light a match and watch it burn. ”

mind-boggling building

What's so exciting about the marriage of these two technologies is how much you can build in such a short period of time without any prior technical experience.

In addition to AI procuring entire codebases with appropriate prompts, the cryptocurrency industry is also building tools to make development at the intersection of both more intuitive and accessible.

For example, Coinbase, which sponsored the bootcamp, launched AgentKit in November. The framework allows developers to build AI agents with their own crypto wallets, allowing the agents to interact autonomously with blockchain networks. This can be used to build an army of agents who can monitor the market and automatically execute trades based on predefined rules and guardrails.

“One day, AI agents will own their own cars, accept payments from customers in cryptocurrencies, and use those cryptocurrencies to purchase repairs,” said Lincoln Ma, associate product manager at Coinbase. It will be managed,” he told attendees.

Coinbase currently has a grant program in place to build with AgentKit. “What you build doesn't have to be useful. We have a bias against cool things,” Ma said at the bootcamp, hoping to inspire projects and applications that no one has thought of yet. .

Ora Network also has an interesting model for developers looking to build AI-enabled Web3 applications and vice versa. This network allows developers to take advantage of current large-scale language models such as Meta's Llama3 and Stable Diffusion, but also allows developers to build their own models and crowdfund their continued development. You can also offer a so-called Initial Model Offering (IMO).

“Currently, it's a winner-takes-all situation in AI, but this model allows crowdfunding to build and train AI, so people can get a share of the models. This is empowering if you think it's going to be ubiquitous in the future, “in 10 years we'll be able to run society,'' Alec James, Ora's head of partnerships and growth, said during the bootcamp. “If so, I would like to see that development decentralized.”

Near, Fleek, and Alora were among the companies that sponsored bootcamps and introduced various tools and programs to build at the intersection of these two innovative technologies.

Can developers do anything?

On the final day of the bootcamp, nine teams presented working prototypes of projects that combined Web3 and AI. These projects range from AI assistants that help you choose gifts, order deliveries, and diversify your financial portfolio to applications that help crypto operators create meme coins with huge virality potential. .

Participant Jackie Joya, who flew in from San Francisco, said the boot camp really gave her the motivation to keep building. Joya, who has a background in animal science, is still a novice when it comes to engineering, but was amazed at how much a novice could build with the tools available.

Other participants of all skill levels said similar things. Chaudhry Imtiaz, a market researcher from Bangladesh, is in the United States on an H-1B1 visa and is waiting for a job. I didn't know about Web3 before the bootcamp, but I was able to pitch my team project on the last day. And Isaya Culbertson, who has worked as an engineer on both cryptocurrency and AI projects separately, says he can learn the skills to build with both, and that it has the potential to change the world for the better. He thinks there is.

“We think this combination will accelerate research and development in so many different areas, while at the same time enabling a more equitable distribution of the wealth generated from that research and development,” he said.