@PINAI_IO
We are developing the world’s first open source Personal Intelligence Network (PIN), enabling AI developers to provide very daily and practical AI services such as shopping, organizing travel, and planning finances.
It has just completed a US$10 million seed round of financing. A number of well-known VCs and angel investors including a16z, CSX, Hack VC, Blockchain Builders Fund (Stanford Blockchain Accelerator) participated in this investment.
The project team comes from Ethereum Core Research, Google Brain, Stanford University, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University
So why did PIN AI, as an AI infrastructure, receive the favor of both A16Z and Stanford?
Project Background
Over the past year, as ChatGPT and similar AI tools have gained widespread adoption and demonstrated impressive capabilities, the blockchain industry has seen increasing interest in how to combine cryptographic primitives with AI. The Crypto × AI space has emerged. On the infrastructure side, there are already many projects focused on providing services such as decentralized computing, data availability/storage, and verifiable reasoning. On the application side, there are experiments such as AI prediction markets, trading agents, and DAO bots. The vast majority of applications are focused on helping users understand and interact with the web3 protocol. While this is an important and growing use case, it still has certain limitations.
At the same time, the AI industry is booming. Living in the Bay Area, we have witnessed firsthand the excitement and energy of building the AI field. Many friends, including talented engineers and scientists, have quit their full-time jobs to start AI projects. On the infrastructure side, there are already some successful projects that provide new and necessary services, such as vector databases, evaluation services, and model routing services. However, on the application side, despite a lot of hype, many well-funded projects are still struggling to find market fit and widespread adoption. The core problem is that AI applications require contextual data to provide useful reasoning services, and without this data, it is almost impossible to provide a more useful service than the latest version of ChatGPT.
Furthermore, large AI labs quickly absorb the best innovations from open source builders, effectively killing or absorbing new projects at their infancy, while large tech companies attempt to monopolize access to AI services.
PIN AI solves these problems and builds PIN AI from a different path: creating an open AI network with access to massive contextual data, enabling AI builders to create a variety of useful AI applications. PIN is rooted in open source AI and Ethereum, with three foundational layers: personal data (focusing on privacy and data ownership), personal AI (practical and trustworthy companion AI on private devices), and external AI (an open AI service market)
Project Introduction
PIN AI is an open source personal AI platform that integrates open source artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to open up new areas of personal digital experience and protect data ownership and privacy.
PIN AI design ideas
Simply put, PIN AI = AI + DePIN
The PIN AI network consists of two types of AI:
Personal AI: A personalized AI agent that adapts to user preferences in real time. It is the connection point between the user and the agent service, a bit like a coordinator. Users can download it to their mobile phone or computer device for use.
Agentic Services: AI Agents built on-chain for Web2 platforms that can perform tasks on some of the top Web2 platforms, with the execution process and completion status recorded on the blockchain
The official also mentioned external AI, which may support interaction with other LLM or Web2 AI Agents in the future.
PIN AI architecture core:
PIN Protocol, a DePIN distributed data storage network, allows anyone to connect their devices to the network and share data. It integrates a BERT-based model to anonymize data at all stages of processing user data, ensuring privacy and compliance with data protection regulations.
Personal AI is built in. On one hand, it provides personalized data for personal AI, and on the other hand, it provides the most relevant data for agent services.
The PIN Protocol is built from three components:
1. Private storage and computing layer: Distributed storage data, securely storing device data shared by users (including photos, videos, etc.), and making the most relevant data readily available for personal AI and proxy services. Users can connect their devices to the network, provide device data, and receive native token $PIN rewards.
2. Data connector: Use zk technology to track and verify user data connected to the network. I think it is equivalent to the node of the PIN network. The node operator needs to stake $PIN tokens to do verification, and some token holders can stake tokens to the node, and both can get token staking rewards.
3. Agent Linking: Aims to match personal AI with agent services. It consists of an agent registry and a transaction mechanism, the former is used to track performance indicators, while the latter "thinks" about how to match personal AI with agent services (based on the cost, performance, and completion quality of each agent service)
User usage pattern/business logic:
When a user makes a specific request, PIN AI will follow the steps below:
Step 1: Personal AI - Collecting user requirements
The user makes a request to the personal AI, and the personal AI forwards the request to the PIN Protocol
Step 2: PIN Protocol - Preparation before task execution
Break down user intent into specific steps, find the most suitable and cost-effective proxy service, retrieve the most relevant data, and provide it to the proxy service. (If multiple Web2 platforms are involved, the intent needs to be split into different proxy services)
Step 3: Proxy service - Execute specific steps
Step 4: PIN Protocol - Feedback to the User
After all, most of the daily life needs require money transactions. In PIN AI, the flow of funds should be:
The user pays the Gas fee to the PIN Protocol (I guess it is to activate this intent transaction). Since the PIN Protocol first disassembles the user's intent, and then indexes and sends the data most relevant to the intent to the proxy service, after the proxy service completes the task, it will give part of the service fee back to the PIN Protocol as a tip.
Therefore, both PIN Protocol and proxy services can earn commissions from the service fees given by users.
Team Background
The project team comes from Ethereum Core Research, Google Brain, Stanford University, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University
Davide Crapis - Co-founder
Background in blockchain protocol design, with some AI background
He worked as a senior data scientist at Lyft, where he designed and implemented an incentive allocation algorithm that issued $xx in growth incentives to passengers and drivers each year. After resigning, he worked as an independent researcher for a while, studying incentive schemes and token allocation. Before founding PIN AI, he worked as a research scientist in the Ethereum Foundation’s “robust incentives” direction.
He has developed a machine learning model for "consumer sensitivity to investment/credit product interest rates" and worked as a researcher and mentor in machine learning at Columbia Business School for four years. He has joined the Web2 developer community "South Park" to explore the intersection of large language models and blockchain.
Ben Wu - Co-founder
Operational background, may provide strategic direction and AI product ideas
Graduated from MIT and a Y Combinator alumnus. Before founding PIN AI, he worked as the Director of Database and Operations in Yahoo's Strategic Data Solutions Division, responsible for the operation and management of large-scale data projects.
Bill Sun - Co-founder, Chief Scientist
Quantitative Trading and AI Background
PhD in Mathematics from Stanford University, worked on AI research at Google DeepMind. Worked as an AI/quantitative trading stock investment manager at a Wall Street asset management company. Founded AI research organization AI+Club and AI technology community AGI House. Angel investor of a16z scout fund. He is also the founder of Generative Alpha, which provides enterprise-level AI solutions.
Project Lineup and Financing
AI infrastructure company PIN AI completed a $10 million pre-seed round of financing, with participation from a16z CSX, Hack VC, Blockchain Builders Fund (Stanford Blockchain Accelerator), Illia Polosukhin (founder of NEAR Protocol), Anagram/Lily Liu (Chairman of Solana Foundation), Symbolic Capital (co-founder of Polygon), Evan Cheng (Mysten Labs/SUI CEO), dcbuilder (Worldcoin Foundation), Foresight Ventures (parent company of The Block), Nomad Capital, Tim Shi (co-founder of Cresta), Ben Fisch (CEO of Espresso), Scott Moore (co-founder of Gitcoin), Alumni Ventures and Dispersion Capital.
Summarize:
In the first industrial revolution, machinery freed our hands;
The second industrial revolution, electricity broke the boundary between day and night;
In the third industrial revolution, the Internet merges the boundaries between the virtual and the real.
The emergence of AI is generally considered to be a sign of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and AI Agent is the ticket for this journey of exploration. Each of us can board this ship heading for the future of "human-computer interaction".
Over the past few decades, a large amount of activities have taken place on the Internet every day and massive amounts of data have been generated. However, users do not have ownership of this data.
iPhone16 has just been released, bringing Apple Intelligence, but PIN AI has the opportunity to build an AI Agent ecosystem that is more open than Apple Intelligence.
Among them, developers can get rewards by developing innovative Web2 platform agent services, which will give birth to AI agents with higher and higher performance and quality, triggering a wave of innovation.
Billions of mobile phone users can not only use personalized personal AI, but also share device data to earn rewards.
User data supports the entire PIN AI ecosystem. This is the power of users, and it is also the starting point of Web3 - decentralization and ownership
PIN AI is an open AI network platform dedicated to providing personalized AI experience. Thanks to the support of a16z Crypto and the endorsement of $10 million in seed round financing, PIN AI has attracted many well-known investment institutions, including Stanford Blockchain Accelerator, Hack VC, etc., and many well-known Web3 people as angel investors, such as NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin and Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu.
PIN AI is designed to be deeply integrated into users' daily lives. Its personalized experience and decentralized architecture cater to the dual needs of Web3 users for privacy and practicality. Compared with traditional AI tools, PIN AI provides users with a higher-value service experience. Users can also receive $PIN token rewards by contributing device data to the network, further enhancing user stickiness.
In addition, PIN Protocol's multi-layer architecture and decentralized incentive mechanism will attract more developers and nodes to join the network, expanding the diversity and coverage of services.
PIN AI's technical architecture and application scenarios make it extremely attractive in the intersection of Web3 and AI, with huge potential.
