Open Conversations: Decentralized AI: The Fight for Privacy and Trust (Jarrod Barnes)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 3:52
Jarrod Barnes of the NEAR Foundation describes NEAR protocol as a blockchain built for AI, and gives two reasons blockchains matter for AI: verifiable, immutable sources of truth, and ownership of data that models might otherwise consume. He announces NEAR Protocol Rewards, a metric-based program that tracks onchain and offchain activity and pays builders in the ecosystem, which he says can reach 10,000 US dollars per month. He opens with a public park analogy for public goods and closes with what mentoring at Funding the Commons involves, such as removing roadblocks and listening to understand.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
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when you think about public goods my first uh analogy is a public park I take my daughter to the park she enjoys it she'll play in a fountain she'll go in a swing there's an inherent value to that but there is also individuals who care about maintaining that Park ensuring that Park is safe and so when you think about that example in the context of software of fundamental pieces of technology that actually enable all of us to either create value or experience value there's such a importance to that that often times when you're thinking about just building business model or you know driving Revenue it may not be top of mind I'm Jared Barnes I work at the near Foundation near protocol is a blockchain that's purpose-built for AI how do you know what AI is saying is
truth and what is that source of truth that it's pulling from and if we gave it something that is immutable and gave it something that we know has been verified as true something on chain that ultimately can fuel verif reliability in a world where it's hard to know what is true so that's one bucket and the other bucket is on the Privacy side if AI models continually use this video uh as training data what will actually be ours to own and will we actually own anything or will AI just consume everything that we've ever had those are the two like pillars of wide blockchain need AI the world of AI is moving so fast and there is a subset of companies in the world
that are doing incredible things but in a highly centralized way and so we fundamentally believe that time for uh decentralized organizations and the time for foundations like ourselves to have a meaningful impact is right now what is our impact in that space and near often time comes through individual people and being able to support them at a critical time in their Journey so we're launching a program at one initiative that we're excited about is called near protocol rewards it's essentially an objective and Metric based reward system uh for builders in the near ecosystem it tracks both offchain and onchain activity um and Builders could earn up to 10,000 uh USD uh per month uh as they continue building their project so we're excited
about those type of initiatives that can really Drive our ecosystem forward not only in the number of Builders uh but particularly what they can choose to build and not always have to immediately focus on uh something that's monetizable or immediately focus on um something that has to drive value today but could be actually leveraged in a really really powerful way the fund in the Commons Community has blown me away uh I think to have such a unique talented uh smart group of people all in one room together who may be coming from very different walks of life maybe coming from very different organizations but deeply care about the mission and deeply care about uh advancing the space forward coming
into this space as a mentor really has been an opportunity to just show up for people to help people get from where they're at to where they want to go um and to remove roadblox I think that's such a key component of what it means to be a mentor um whether that be sitting down with someone and going through a codebase and actually debugging or helping explain a little bit more about the technology whether that be just sitting down and creating space for someone to share what they're excited and passionate about and listen to understand versus listening to respond or uh having an impactful conversation about what we might do to solve real problems [Music]