The strongest Open Source AI? Detailed explanation of Near technology and ecosystem development, how does a 7-year-old project reshape the future

Near.ai → NEAR Protocol → NEAR AI

At the end of 2017, there was a shocking AI paper in the academic world—NLP & AI Revolution. At that time, four of the six authors of the paper started AI-related companies (later joined openAI), and the other one was Illia, the founder of NEAR AI. At that time, when we saw this paper, we started to contact Illia. I first went to the Near office in 2018, at an underground shared space in San Francisco, where a group of engineers gathered for a workshop. We chatted with this founding team from Ukraine for a long time, helped Illia with his visa to come to China, and helped them prepare for over 4 offline developer events within 3 months.

As a 7-year-old encryption OG project, NEAR's two founders are quite well-known in the artificial intelligence industry, including Illia Polosukhin, a co-creator of the Transformers architecture, and Alexander Skidanov, a guru in the MemSQL industry. Their initial idea was to train models through global computer science students and implement program synthesis. Therefore, NEAR was initially established as 'Near.ai' with a belief: they could not only make research breakthroughs in the program synthesis industry, but also launch a revolutionary product driven by this technology. (Interest-related: IOSG participated in Near's early round of investment in 2018)

Image source: IOSG Ventures

However, in 2017, the machine learning industry, especially natural language processing (NLP), was far from being as mature as it is today. The real challenge was to achieve program synthesis and solve practical problems. Therefore, their consultants suggested that they try to apply program synthesis technology to solve the problem of developers writing verifiable smart contracts on the Ether network. However, at that time, the Ether network still had many limitations, especially in terms of the availability and scalability of microtransactions. No blockchain or traditional payment system could meet the demand.

Therefore, NEAR spent six years building a blockchain that is both highly scalable and user-friendly, capable of meeting the demand for microtransactions and providing a familiar onboarding process. It addresses a series of issues such as cold start, Secret Key management, and account availability. However, this has also led the market to shift its focus from artificial intelligence to an unclearly positioned Layer 1 blockchain. With the emergence of more and more innovations in cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, including computing markets, reasoning networks, and the proliferation of numerous AI agents, as well as the outstanding price performance of high Market Cap AI Tokens like $TAO and $WLD, it seems that people have forgotten that $NEAR is the pioneer in this industry.

After seven years of development, with the improvement of the NEAR infrastructure, NEAR has now an ecosystem that is scalable, easy to use, and easy to develop for blockchain and application builders. Illia and Alexander can finally refocus NEAR's goals on the original vision, which is to build NEAR AI into the center of artificial intelligence owned by users in the next stage of 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 applications.

NEAR is driven by the vision of user ownership of AI, built on the Web 3 track. Compared to the centralized AI model controlled by large tech companies, NEAR believes that user-owned AI provides a truly better choice for developers and users. Through Web3 and the entire NEAR ecosystem, NEAR hopes to maximize the benefits of AI for humanity and communities, while minimizing the potential risks of centralization, drop.

Given that the Crypto x AI industry is still in its early stages, NEAR's strategy is to plan to enhance the development of the entire Web 3 AI ecosystem from a more non-profit perspective, whether through incubators, accelerators, investments, building their own Open Source AI research center and tools, or using competitions to cultivate community-driven AI development methods. Its strategic goal is to achieve the vision that the results of AI can be truly shared by the community. As for the enhancement of its Token economy benefits, it is not NEAR's highest priority at the moment.

This article will focus on introducing the re-layout of NEAR in the Crypto x AI track, helping everyone better understand its positioning in the Web 3 AI ecosystem.

Image source: IOSG Ventures

NEAR Foundation Incubator

To echo this theme, the Near Foundation announced the launch of the NEAR AI x HZN Incubator in May, along with the establishment of an investment department focused on AI projects and a research and development laboratory.

Image Source: X

Near Foundation has selected 11 projects to support, and the participating projects in the incubator will receive access to the AI expert network of NEAR, specialized technical and Token release support, computing resources, and financing opportunities during the initial 12 weeks of the program (June to August 2024), as well as in the subsequent stages (until May 2025).

These projects cover multiple aspects of AI technology stack, including data, models, computation, and inference, aiming to provide an open AI solution that can be safely accessed and decentralized for AI users and developers, breaking the monopoly of centralized AI service providers.

Some highlights 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 test version data preprocessing platform, attracting 20,000 users in the first week.

Pond: launched its first model based on Graph Neural Network (GNN), using on-chain data for wallet prediction and achieving 20% prediction success rate.

Image source: IOSG Ventures

NEAR x Delphi Labs Accelerator

Due to the good results achieved in the early incubation, NEAR further collaborated with Delphi Labs (another research and venture capital company that is very active in the Crypto and AI industries) to jointly announce the first joint AI accelerator program. This is a strategic initiative aimed at supporting and rapidly expanding projects that have high potential in the intersection of AI and Web3. The program will start on October 15th and continue until early December.

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

Image 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 launched Near AI at its REDACTED event on November 8, positioning itself as an AI blockchain and introducing three important developments.

NEAR AI Assistant

Near AI Assistant is a helper similar to a chatbot that can answer various general questions such as 'What is IOSG Ventures?' and 'What is Near AI?'. The AI assistant provides local memory function for each user, can be associated with each NEAR account, remembers information during the conversation with the user, and uses this memory when interacting with different agents on its platform.

More importantly, it allows non-technical creators and developers to easily perform many operations related to crypto, especially those related to Cryptocurrency. Users only need a few sentences to prompt the AI assistant to complete the operation, such as creating meme coin images for users, generating websites for the meme coin, and launching them on the Pump.Fun platform to achieve AI agent Fiat Currency.

Image source: Accessing the Near AI assistant via chat.near.ai (currently in ALPHA testing phase)

Building Open Source toolset for AI agents

NEAR also released a helper API toolkit to help users build, measure, and deploy AI agents and integrate them into specific applications.

Currently, there are more than 60 agents uploaded to the NEAR Agents Hub, each focusing on different applications of Web2 and Web3, such as web crawling, Token exchange agents, YouTube transcription agents, etc. Each agent can connect and call other uploaded AI agents to execute tasks.

In future updates, the agents on NearAI can even interact with external services and APIs for transactions.

Access AI research and resources for community building, used for developing cutting-edge models

NEAR believes that Open Source contributions are key to enabling users to own AI. To achieve this goal, NEAR has launched the AI Research Hub, which brings together all the toolkits and infrastructure researchers need to build Open Source AI, including datasets, models, inference, decentralized storage and computation, etc. One important feature of these Open Source toolkits is the Benchmark testing tool, which allows developers to compare different implementations of agents and models with the same functionality, helping users continuously adjust and improve their agent and model performance indicators over time.

To ensure the development of state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, NEAR AI Research Hub also continuously optimizes the model through competition. Currently, NEAR is hosting 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 in NEAR protocol core Node using Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and GPU, ensuring that the models can protect privacy and have potential for monetization.

Image source: app.near.ai/competitions

Clearly, in order to capture the value created by Open Source contributors, it is necessary to give them appropriate incentives and rewards. NEAR has been planning the roadmap for the future, planning to establish a reward and copyright distribution system for competitions and model usage.

Conclusion

In NEAR's vision of users owning AI, NEAR welcomes anyone to contribute, and everyone's contributions will be valued and rewarded. Code contributions are not the only way to help the community. Answering questions, helping others, and improving documentation are also of great value.

With the continuous expansion of NEAR's functionality in the AI industry, NEAR has the potential to become the preferred platform for Decentralization AI development, paving the way for the next generation of AI-based Decentralization applications (dApps).

In fact, we have already seen some AI-related dApps built on NEAR. For example, a protocol called Bitte is dedicated to decentralized proxy law, and its proxy extension application scenarios include Non-fungible Token minting, Cross-Chain Interaction transactions, etc.

Clearly, there are many innovations in the NEAR ecosystem that go beyond AI. To explore more projects in the ecosystem, you can refer to a post shared by Marcus:

Image Source: X

Currently, there is no clear connection between NEAR's AI strategy, the integration of $NEAR Token and blockchain, and how to accumulate value for $NEAR Token. However, in the future, Web3 dApps developed based on the NEAR AI platform may land in the NEAR ecosystem. $NEAR Token may be used to reward and incentivize users participating in model training competitions, or as a means of payment for using platform proxy services. In the future, when users need to invoke proxy services on the NEAR platform, they may need to pay $NEAR Token as a usage fee.

Regardless, this AI strategy will greatly promote more users to embrace Decentralization Web 3 AI, taking an important step towards users fully controlling their own AI future.

【Disclaimer】There are risks in the market, and investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice. Users should consider whether any opinions, viewpoints, or conclusions in this article are suitable for their specific situation. The responsibility for investment is at your own risk.

This article is authorized for reprint from: "Foresight News"

Original author: IOSG Ventures

'The Strongest Open Source AI? Detailed Explanation of Near Technology, Ecological Development, How the 7-Year-Old Project Reshapes the Future' This article was first published in 'encryption City'