Remember those middle-school writing prompts: Describe your favorite cookie. Your teacher told you to write it as if to an alien, a being who had never encountered a cookie before, which meant touching on each sense – sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. You might not have realized it then, but describing something in a way that allows people to get a clear picture is actually quite hard.
Let me try to describe Matheus Pagani, founder and CEO of Venture Miner. Matheus is a male with light caramel skin and dark brown hair. Even though his hair is cut close, you can tell it’s curly. He’s got a thick dark brown, almost black beard, which connects to a mustache. His eyes are dark brown behind thin wire glasses. His bottom lip sticks out a little further from his top lip, giving him a look of assurance, but not arrogance.
Picturing him yet? How confident are you? Oh yeah, and he’s Brazilian.
Got it? Let’s see what Matheus Pagani actually looks like.
Is this what you had come up with in your head from my description? Doubt it. Whenever I told you he was Brazilian, did you accessorize him in bright colors and a feathered headdress? Something like this?
If so, check your bias, but also you’re thinking like an AI. That was what ChatGPT came up with from the prompt “some Brazilians having fun.” Pagani showed this and other examples spit out by our generative AI during the AI2Web3 Bootcamp in NYC in early December.
The bootcamp, run by Pagani and Build City, brought together 59 participants across all skill levels to learn how the two buzziest (and often misunderstood) technologies can be innovatively combined to create useful products and services. Pagani used a version of the middle-school assignment to explain how and why AI has made significant leaps that have kept us all excited and on edge over the past few years. Before, only text data was primarily utilized to train AIs, which only goes so far. However, mixing text information with visual data provides a fuller picture.
Understanding this, and getting hands-on with both AI and blockchain technology, helps participants grasp their core components. For Pagani, these skills will soon be indispensable for nearly all people – engineers, tech users, journalists, artists, doctors.
“We want to join brilliant minds from all backgrounds to come and work with AI and Web3, since the junction of their multiple perspectives can uncover new use cases that we would never envision just with a specialized Web3 or AI mindset alone,” Pagani explained. “Nowadays we have tools to easily enable any non-technical enthusiasts to build practically functional applications and systems just with ‘plain English,’ so what matters is bringing passionate people interested in solving problems together with the proper education. When you have this combination, you just need to light the match and watch it burn.”
Mind-Boggling Building
The intersection of these two technologies is thrilling because much can be built in a short period of time without requiring extensive prior technical experience.
AI can now source entire codebases with the right prompt, and the cryptocurrency industry is developing tools to make working at the intersection of both realms more intuitive and accessible.
For instance, Coinbase, a sponsor of the bootcamp, launched AgentKit in November, a framework that allows developers to build AI agents with their own crypto wallets. This enables the agents to interact autonomously with blockchain networks. It could be leveraged to create a squad of agents that monitor the markets and execute trades based on predefined rules and parameters.
“One day, we’ll have AI agents owning their own cars and operating their own taxi services that accept payments in crypto and then use that currency to cover repairs,” Lincoln Murr, an associate product manager at Coinbase, told attendees.
Coinbase is currently running a grants program for projects built with AgentKit. “What you build doesn’t have to be functional; we have a bias towards cool stuff,” said Murr, aiming to inspire innovative projects and applications yet to be imagined.
Ora Network also offers an intriguing model for developers looking to create AI-enabled Web3 applications or vice versa. The network enables developers to utilize current large language models, including Meta’s Llama3 and Stable Diffusion, while also allowing them to build their own models and crowdsource their continued development through an initial model offering (IMO).
“It’s kind of winner-takes-all right now in AI, but this model allows crowdfunding for AI development, empowering those involved to share in the evolution of these models,” Alec James, partnerships and growth lead at Ora, remarked during the bootcamp. “If AI is set to shape society in the coming decade, we need to consider a distributed approach.”
Near, Fleek, and Alora also sponsored the bootcamp, showcasing various tools and programs for building at the confluence of these groundbreaking technologies.
Can Devs Do Something?
On the final day of the bootcamp, nine teams presented working prototypes for projects that fused Web3 and AI. These projects ranged from AI assistants designed to help users select gifts, manage delivery orders, or diversify their financial portfolios, to applications aimed at helping crypto operators to generate highly viral memecoins.
Jackie Joya, a participant who traveled from San Francisco, expressed her newfound inspiration to continue building. With a background in animal science, Joya is relatively new to engineering but was amazed at what a novice could accomplish with the available tools.
Other attendees echoed similar sentiments. Choudhury Imtiaz, a market researcher from Bangladesh currently in the U.S. on an H-1B1 Visa, was unaware of Web3 prior to the bootcamp, yet confidently pitched a team project. Isayah Culbertson, who has worked as an engineer in both crypto and AI projects independently, noted the immense potential of integrating both domains for positive change.
“I see this combination accelerating research and development across numerous fields, while also paving the way for a more equitable distribution of wealth generated from that research,” he stated.
