With ChatGPT becoming popular in late 2022, AI has once again become the focus of attention. The last time AI set off a wave of public opinion was in 2016 when AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, the world's top Go player, 4:1.
But unlike last time, this time the AI is stronger. After intensive training, AI can create new content based on user needs.
Facing the rapid development of AI, how to combine Web3 and AI has also become a concern of blockchain practitioners.
In AI, a very important point is machine learning (Machine Learning, ML for short), and when ML is added to Web3, it can be extended to different network levels of web3 and produce many interesting effects.
TheStage.ai, a full-stack Web3 artificial intelligence platform, is developed by a team of top AI scholars and practitioners. Its concept of AI + Web3 has attracted many employers and Web3 practitioners. Web3CN has an exclusive interview with Alex, the CEO and founder of TheStage.ai, hoping to help everyone understand the project more comprehensively and deeply.
The following is the full content of this interview:
Moderator/Host: Web3CN
Guest/Speaker: Alex (TheStage.ai CEO & Co-founder)
Host: Welcome Alex, the CEO and co-founder of TheStage.ai, to interview Web3CN. Currently AI is a hot topic. I believe everyone will be very interested in the combination of AI and Web3. We would like to know more about TheStage.ai project through the following questions.
Alex: Hello everyone! I'm Alex, CEO and Co-Founder of TheStage.ai. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Indeed, AI is a very exciting topic and combining blockchain and Web3 technologies with artificial intelligence is a completely new approach that can yield amazing results.
Q1: Please briefly introduce what kind of project TheStage.ai is? Why would you want to do such a project?
Alex: TheStage.ai is a full-stack Web3 artificial intelligence platform developed by a team of top AI academics and practitioners. Our platform helps AI researchers and engineers run their AI models by providing them with convenient tools, affordable computing resources, and one-click deployment. This is achieved through decentralized computing power, access to pre-trained validation models, and a proof-of-training mechanism.
Additionally, TheStage.ai has built an architecture that allows users to rent out their GPU or CPU, upload AI models, contribute datasets and earn rewards. This creates a thriving ecosystem that integrates native cryptocurrency rewards and encourages collaboration among model providers, data contributors, analysts, and developers. As they collaborate, the platform becomes more powerful and versatile, fostering innovation, creativity and community building.
Our core engineering team, including our Chief Technology Officer, Chief Architect, Chief Scientist, etc., have worked at Huawei several years ago. Huawei is an excellent gateway for engineers to artificial intelligence, as the company spends around 30% of its budget on research, probably more than any other company in the world. Huawei widely uses artificial intelligence in its products. While utilizing cutting-edge AI technologies such as deep neural network, transformer technology, diffusion, etc., our team conceived the idea of TheStage.ai - an idea that can optimize this work and make AI more accessible A platform embraced by a wider audience.
We've run into many challenges ourselves and quickly realized we might not be the only ones facing them. So we decided to build a product to help our AI researchers and developers develop and apply AI products in their work by providing them with cutting-edge, user-friendly tools.
Most businesses can benefit from AI but don't know how to implement it in their day-to-day operations. There are no established best practices in this area and the level of understanding is extremely low. Our platform aims to demonstrate that AI development is not difficult and affordable for both enterprises and SMEs.
Q2: There are some platforms similar to TheStage.ai. Does TheStage.ai have any unique advantages in terms of technology and algorithm?
Alex: While some of our Web2 competitors have amassed a sizable number of AI models on their platforms, it can be extremely challenging to browse their databases, determine whether a model is truly state-of-the-art, and deploy it. One of our key strengths is our proprietary technology for model optimization that can reduce the computational cost of running a model by a factor of 4-5. This allows the models to be deployed on laptops, tablets and even smartphones. Additionally, we have developed an innovative proof-of-training mechanism that uses multi-party encryption on a distributed blockchain storage facility to guard against AI fraud and scams. Each model is presented as a secure encrypted NFT, ensuring the model matches the demo results and preventing fake APIs from being served with unverified models.
AI projects seem to be rather underwhelmed when researching the Web3 space. There are very few of them, and they appear to have been created by Web3 developers who may not fully understand how AI tools are supposed to work. This makes it difficult for such projects to build a user base and have a significant impact.
However, this is no criticism; the situation is completely understandable since AI is a relatively young field in IT. Transformer technology was only introduced in 2017 and has not been widely used until recently. As a result, the industry is still a few years away from maturity, giving entrepreneurs time to determine what products the market wants.
Q3: How is the current product development progress of TheStage.ai? Is there any specific product launch plan?
Alex: We're really excited about our progress so far. We have completed the first version of the platform backend, which allows us to serve our initial enterprise customers by delivering impressive AI tools, such as a recent audio compression codec and picture upscaling tool.
We have also finalized the structure of the TheStage.ai platform front-end and expect to launch the first version of the full-stack platform in about 3 months. This release will include approximately 100 of the most advanced AI models available, including proof-of-training mechanisms run by our trusted nodes.
Q4: How is the financing progress of TheStage.ai? Can you tell me which investment institutions have invested in TheStage.ai?
Alex: We are currently in the pre-seed stage, aiming to raise an initial, modest amount of funding to support our product line and marketing efforts. We're very excited about the interest from several high-profile venture capitalists and angel investors. Our plan is to have discussions with top investors in the coming weeks before deciding on our syndicate for this round. At this early stage, securing funding from the best sources is critical. We are eager to partner with investors who understand the AI and Web3 space, appreciate what we are building, and can contribute to our success.
Q5: Can you introduce the business model of TheStage.ai?
Alex: The most effective business models are those that create additional value for users. TheStage.ai significantly reduces the cost of computing resources compared to AWS or Azure, which is why we firmly believe that we can attract a large number of users.
Also, we will operate as an AI model marketplace. Model checkpoints are registered as NFTs on the blockchain, allowing NFT owners to sell or rent these models for a fee. TheStage.ai will receive a small commission on these transactions in accordance with the classic marketplace business model.
Q6: The underlying decentralized computing power system requires a lot of GPU computing power to participate in mining. How will you attract miners to participate in computing power provision?
Alex: Current AI platform and cloud companies make money by providing computing resources to AI researchers and users. They don't really focus on optimizing computations, because that would reduce their workload. On such platforms, "optimization" usually involves providing more computing resources for faster processing, which increases the cost proportionally.
TheStage's mission is to make AI as affordable as possible. In our view, "optimization" means reducing the computational cost, and we can achieve a cost reduction of 4-5 times. We believe we can create significant demand on the platform, which in turn will drive GPU supply. As mentioned earlier, both the providers of the GPUs and our miners will be rewarded, just like in a proof-of-work system.
Q7: Essentially, TheStage.ai is an AI model developer platform that provides developers with low-cost computing services for training AI models. In addition to lower usage costs, what measures will you take to attract more AI developers? Or come to your platform for AI model training?
Alex: TheStage.ai is designed as a one-stop shop for AI practitioners, simplifying the implementation of AI in various use cases. Our powerful search engine easily matches business tasks, budgets, and platform requirements with a variety of existing AI solutions, ensuring fast and straightforward AI implementation.
We provide a wide range of AI application templates for any platform and guarantee that deployment is aligned with user goals. Our platform processes user requests 4x faster across cloud, smartphone, and desktop. Additionally, we offer rewards for contributors of hardware or work, which will further increase interest in our platform.
Another key attraction of TheStage.ai is our focus on the academic research community. Our engineers have extensive scientific backgrounds and have authored more than 10 important papers. This year, our CTO Kirill and a group of researchers from our company became one of the winning candidates for the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR, Integral Neural Networks Papers) and will participate as one of 12 speakers on June 18 Events until the 22nd. As one of the largest events in the field of AI, it is an honor for our team to be selected among more than 9,000 candidates.
We will continue our research and development work to ensure that our products have absolute advantages and continue to attract talented employees and users. We will introduce competitions and hackathons in TheStage, hold lectures and workshops at educational institutions, and share our research work with the professional community.
Q8: What is the future development plan of TheStage.ai?
We plan to focus on the security infrastructure at TheStage.ai, ensuring comprehensive protection of sensitive data such as financial, medical, scientific and private information at all levels (government, corporate and personal). By using Federated Computing, Homomorphic Encryption and ZK (Zero-Knowledge) Computing, our security measures will prevent data leakage and keep data processing secure.
In the longer term, our plans include creating TheStage blockchain with a proof-of-training consensus protocol. This major innovation will allow miners on our platform to be rewarded for performing efficient work, providing computing resources for training AI models and processing user requests. This development has the potential to be truly revolutionary!
Q9: In what ways can ordinary users participate in TheStage.ai and benefit?
We invite you to join our platform and explore the world of AI. You'll soon realize it's not as difficult as it seems. With TheStage.ai, you can apply AI techniques to your business goals or research, participate in calculations to earn rewards, or sell or lease your models as NFTs to earn money.
It's an exciting outcome that performs the work and is rewarded immediately. We would be grateful if you could visit our website ( https://www.thestage.ai ) and register as an early adopter of the platform.
Host: Thanks to Alex for sharing, let us have a deeper understanding of Thestage.ai, interested friends can pay attention to Thestage.ai and Web3CN, and we will continue to understand the latest developments in the Web3 industry.
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Web3CN
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Thestage.ai
A full-stack Web3 artificial intelligence platform developed by a team of top AI scholars and practitioners. The platform helps AI researchers and engineers run their AI models by providing them with convenient tools, affordable computing resources, and one-click deployment.
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