Blockchain Operating System for a Post-AI World

Transcript

so we have two final Keynotes both amazing speakers to close CBC 23. our first keynote speaker has been delivering the closing keynote last year and I have mentioned last year that she is a female Powerhouse and that still has not changed and I am curious to hear that in a span of one year what has changed at near Marie Lamont yes thank you fan club um

well I thought given the incredible weather that is outside the only way probably to have people in one room is to talk about the two most trendy things which are blockchain and AI so that's that's that's the goal of that talk uh but all jokes aside you will see there is actually a very very strong link between near Nai and in our origin story so a couple of things we have 20 minutes or so I want to do three things one of course what is near where are we at and what are what is the evolution in our journey I also want to take a step back and remind ourselves of why web3 I think why all of us are here and explain a little bit why we think AI is near what is near uh all of you might have

heard about near as a layer one proof of stake layer one at near we've always thought about Simplicity and usability uh for users and that's why we always prioritize what does it mean for developers to be able to develop for users to actually be able to use security scalability and sustainability are also things that have been embedded from day one but near is not just a layer one one of the things that actually we've been embarking on as a journey is to evolve from just a layer one to become what we call a blockchain operating system and what does that mean well in short it means that if you look at the layer one landscape today there is actually over 150 layer one or even more and it's actually it feels very

Territorial and it feels actually very click tick and that's probably not what is needed for really solving the problems of web3 as we see them needed and therefore what is needed is the trend of what we hear talk a lot about which is a world that is actually interoperable and multi-chain and a world that is also thinking about where do you want to decentralize do you want to decentralize just the front end the middleware or actually the back end and that's because of the technology we've been building and near for many years now we have the unique ability to be able to do that if you want to learn more I highly encourage you to actually look at the blockchain operating system very concretely what does it mean it means that our website near.org is probably the first and the only fully rendered

websites on web3 and you can actually start chatting and creating widgets and multiplying things on air.org but let's go back to the topic which is AI um near the name is actually because Singularity is near the background of Alex and Ilya the co-founders of near is in Ai and so the story The originating story is actually the the initial idea was to say well imagine if there was a program in the world that actually could self-code how wouldn't that be cool and to do that the guys had actually uh you know Freelancers and project owners all around the world and needed to pay them

and to pay those guys they thought okay we heard about blockchain so we're going to use blockchain and guess what they figured out very quickly there was very expensive and very slow and didn't really work and so that's why this transition from the original idea of AI became a pivot into actually creating near as a layer one so I'm mentioning that because there is a genuine real strong link uh into what we do and how that come uh Ilia is one of the co-authors of attention is all you need which is probably the most read uh AI paper there is out there so that was our Evolution started as a neo.ai became a layer one evolving into a blockchain operating system our mission remains absolutely the same we're committed to bring in one billion

users into web 3 because we genuinely believe that actually it helps create a better world so why what three uh when you look at actually the world as we have it around us and when you look at many many things from the ecological crisis to the economical crisis to the political divide and the psychological divide that we have in our society I think there's never been a better moment to go back to the basis of why do we need web3 because it empowers each and every individual because actually it can also help us solve some of those very large problems sometimes we get distracted and we think about trading or casinos instead of actually thinking about solving real

problems but that's the origin of web3 right that's that's why we are here now where are we at on this journey I think we are somewhere between web 2 and web 3 and I'm sure a lot of you will agree to that I know the term web 2.5 is very often criticized for not being the real thing but here's my question how do we get 1 billion users if we have no ambition to actually bring on the ones that are in web 2 quite impossible and therefore doing that is actually very important being able to bring web2 users into web3 more than ever when you look at actually the state of the internet or actually the internet being taken over by very few individuals I think it's fair to say

and we've collected those different images from people saying that more than ever it feels that we do need to go back to the roots of ownership and decentralization and that's also our deepest belief and yet we have a lot of work to do all of us I think it's not just them we're all part of this ecosystem we all suffer when one of us actually suffers and so the reality is that we have progress to make on usability because if it still takes five different steps to get into web 3 well no one is going to be able to do that I'm very happy to report that near has launched something that it will Fast auth which you can try on neo.org which is actually better than any web 2 onboarding and with that without

actually having to know anything about crypto you can actually be onboarded into web3 experiences we need things like that to really be able to truly have the adoption that is needed things are not yet fully decentralized most apps are actually centralized Services I think we heard a lot from the previous panels but there is still you know centralized exchanges and and it's an additional layer that is built on the true original Vision it's a lot of different separate entities multi-chain interoperability is something that is ultimately extremely needed we cannot ask the partners that we have to have to make a choice for life if things are not actually interoperable at the end of the day the end users do not care what technology things are run on they care

if things are actually doing something 10x or 100x better for them anyway we have a lot of work to do collectively but face is definitely there so let's talk about ai ai has made definitely the headlines over the last few weeks and months and I think that's definitely not going away more and more VC is actually taking their money out of web 3 because that's not trending anymore and putting it into AI now when I look at actually the technologies that exist and the link that can be made between both of them there is a genuine need with I believe for AI to actually be leveraging the capabilities of blockchain which ultimately are a ledger

that is transparent and traceable some of the things and I I I'm sure it's on a lot of of people's mind today but um the speed at which we are entering a dystopian world are actually is actually very worrying and when you look at how things are panning out it's very easy to think that actually AI is becoming more super power to centralize things rather than actually going in a way of decentralizing power and so there is an urgency also to Think Through well how do we actually map things out in a way that redistributes you know ownership and redistributes actually governance versus actually centralizing around very

very few individuals so the things I'm putting out there are just ideas right by no means I'm going to say that I I know exactly but it's something that we think a lot about uh at near we might not be making a lot of noise about it but again because of the background uh of a lot of folks in the team it is something that is front of mind and so the couple of following slides are ideas on what this intersection between blockchain and AI could look like concretely authentication is the first one I mean we are weeks or months away from having the entire internet spammed by we don't know what is true anymore and we actually don't know what's the origin of anything anymore

now good news is the whole purpose of actually blockchain could be having traceability and origin and time stamping and therefore being able to stand by and know exactly what is coming from where something that could prove very very helpful a lot of AI functions on actually very large data sets which we often forget but are very often also done in developing countries and actually to do that you need to train models but you also need to actually micro pay or have transactions for people while near crowd or near task is actually one of our first experiments of that and the amount of data in that open data set that is available is very very large more initiatives like that can also help

create a truly open AI a lot of Gamers around the world are sitting on a ton of GPU and actually thinking back of how do we decentralize that access is something that could definitely also be thought about and and Leverage and the last part on this slide how can we actually prove you know the Integrity on chain today doing security Audits and and it's been a pain for the entire industry doing security Audits and validating that is a key bottleneck and guess what the minute you do it your security audit is not valid anymore well is there a way to actually leverage AI to automate that and to have that traceability probably there is

I already mentioned that but actually I think it's it's very important when we look at what is where are we putting our data and and I'm not going to do a show of Hanford who's using chat GPT because I'm pretty sure it's going to be 100 but whatever we write into this machine is actually not open and it's feeding a closed machine and I think we have to ask ourselves if that's really the true future that we envision or if there is a better future and probably there is actually a better future there is a genuine between democratization and empowerment I think they're probably the same idea but the reality is that lowering the barrier to entry for what three to really have billions of users yes it's usability but it's also the ability for more

developers to participate and if we are only leveraging solidity and rust well that's only a small portion of developers near has a JavaScript SDK that is enabled but now you can actually even power that more imagine that people who don't know how to code are able to actually have prompts who can actually leverage code and therefore build different components if you are interested in more on near.org there is a great post written by Ilya AI on near a look ahead and some of the tangible ideas that are being put out there and for anyone who is actually interested I know some of the conversation I already had been here today there is definitely a lot of interest in that I think we also need to

be looking pragmatically at what will happen from an investment perspective and it's true that while we see a lot of the capital fund flow from work 3 to AI I think finding the the merge between the two might actually be a very good pass forward so some of those I already mentioned so won't go back into it but the post is uh very interesting to read um this is concretely auto-generating decentralized front end is what is possible on on near.org and so what does that mean uh concretely it means that actually you can you can create whatever front-end you wish to create and it can still be running for example on ethereum in the back end if these are the tabs that you're using or actually on near if you go for example

on boss.gg those are some of the attempts at showing actually what the blockchain operating system can do and here again leveraging AI you can multiply that extremely extremely fast there is usually a video on here but it doesn't work so um we've actually had in the community development on exactly that on actually starting to have Quests for saying how can we develop very fast and extremely effectively on the blockchain operating system new widgets that actually train and develop with AI yeah I think it doesn't work so I will leave you with that thought which is actually to get to mass adoption we do

need to lower the barrier to entry and actually we need web3 to really have a killer use case and my question for you and I think it is actually possible but is actually AI the killer a use case for blockchain thank you let's make some noise thank you so much for joining us today thank you do you want to take yeah sure question a couple questions from you do we have six minutes for sorry yeah five minutes request anyone asks questions or chocolate yes give me one second let me bring you the microphone so the question is can you explain near Horizon yeah I didn't cover all the things that um that I've done in

here I thought I would actually uh Foster today on a near Horizon is uh the accelerator that we've launched from near Foundation we realized in 2022 actually that uh if you just give grants to project but there is no hand holding or there is actually no access to resources or there is no connection made with actually backers it doesn't work and so that's what near Horizon is doing and near Horizon is built uh obviously on the blockchain operating system and it has actually it's also the next generation of fractionalized work because let's say you're a lawyer and you want to actually put yourself out there to help startups that are being built on that uh accelerator you can do that thank you for that question great

plug yes thanks uh so up until now basically all uh the panel that we we saw before they were talking about two major things one was uh trust and the other well centralization and uh whenever a technologists come there it talks about trustless and decentralized so who do you think is going to win is going to be finance and financial servicing Services driving technology or technology uh revolutionize and disrupt Financial Services great question well I'm going to be a bit pessimistic here

but we've seen over and over in the world that unfortunately when we trust humans we all have biases and incentives and we think a certain way and so very often actually it ends up not necessarily being the right choice what I think ultimately will win is open source and I don't think closed store systems will win and I think actually having visibility on the code because also can you really trust code well same problem code is made well it's made by humans soon by machine but code is still made by humans and humans have biases and are putting their biases into the code and so the only way to really ultimately trust that is open source and I'm sure the closing Keynotes will have great ideas on on open sourcing so um

right from a centralized perspective of the power accumulation that is maybe I don't know I'm just thinking um building on your question I just think you know whatever we do AI is here and actually regulation it's important to go fast on that front I I think there is more there is more a real need for AI to leverage blockchain whether it's actually for regulation but actually also like you know we're pretty not too far away from a world where a UI is

talking to mine and they have an account on a blockchain they're not going to open a JPMorgan account right so I think we're not too far also from that world so I see those practical use cases which yeah maybe the question could be from differently last question yes um maybe yeah I think that's probably the

hope I'll leave you on that with a parting thought we thought AI was actually going to let us you know go out and enjoy the nice weather but today I'm sure if you look at your feeds what's happening is that AI is having a blast in creating great music and creating great images think about that for the future we're building on and I think there is definitely use cases for blockchain to make AI safer and so those are to be found thank you thank