Author:Haotian
The news that @SaharaLabsAI in the AI+Crypto field received a huge amount of financing of 43 million US dollars has been all over the screen. Indeed, the three major institutional buffs of Binance labs + Polychain + Pantera are enough to make everyone's imagination of AI narrative explode again. How should we view it? Next, I will briefly share my views:
1) Huge amounts of financing will become normalized in the AI+Crypto narrative direction, because AI is not just a pure narrative but also the core foundation of such companies. A company with AI genes can only make sense by building a platform based on the Crypto framework, rather than just finding an AI direction and applying the Crypto model.
Sahara claims that it already has more than 35 major corporate clients including Microsoft, Amazon, MIT, etc. Founder Sean Ren is an AI professor at the University of Southern California, a consultant for many AI platforms and involved in early investments, with a pure AI background. In addition, the team also includes teams with backgrounds from Stanford University, Microsoft, Google, Binance, etc., all of which are elite. All of these are nothing more than sending a signal: Sahara AI is an AI company based on web2 Internet experience, and the Crypto platform framework is only one of its product components.
2) The Internet oligopoly framework will stifle the innovation of small and medium-sized AI companies. Recently, I heard a group of old Internet OGs complain in a podcast that the current AI startup environment is far from the mobile Internet environment. The crux of the problem is that the AI industry lacks real industry exchanges and cooperation. Large companies monopolize large models, and small companies' micro-innovations are directly done by large companies themselves. Most small and micro-innovations lack the soil for survival.
I heard that some Internet big models often raise hundreds of millions of dollars in financing, mostly from the GPU computing power quotas of technology giants rather than cash. The big companies use GPU computing power to exchange for equity, and then use big models to infiltrate existing product lines and user data to improve multimodal performance and revenue. It is difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to find a foothold in the whole process.
I am not sure whether this is the reason why Sahara and other elites with web2 backgrounds are focusing on AI on blockchain. However, the entrepreneurial space for the combination of AI and Crypto, such as blockchain cloud computing service platform, blockchain distributed reasoning platform, blockchain AI co-processing platform, blockchain AI Agent service platform, etc., is much larger than imagined.
Although there are many projects that try to fish in troubled waters, the value of Crypto to the AI industry will not stop improving just because of some industry disorder. Crypto needs AI's grand narrative, and AI needs Crypto to inject development momentum. Relying on AI+Crypto, there is always the possibility of driving incremental users such as large-scale AI developers and users in traditional industries into the blockchain industry.
Imagine if blockchain can trace the resources of AI participants (data, computing power, models) throughout the entire process, and entrepreneurs can crowdfund or exchange resources with equity, it is conceivable that such a mutually beneficial assistance platform will create value for entrepreneurs. Sahara is an AI blockchain collaboration platform that gathers AI resources to help AI innovation, perhaps for this reason.
3) After reading the documents of the AI blockchain collaboration platform that Sahara AI is going to build, I found many key issues:
For example, using Sahara ID and Decentralized storage to provide basic data record traceability and permission management is the basis for Crypto to solve AI user privacy and resource coordination issues;
For example, using Proof of Stake and Data Layer to build a verifiable computing network for on-chain and off-chain data using encryption technology is also the basis for Crypto to improve the reward and punishment mechanism for collaborative use of AI models;
In addition, the execution layer has greatly optimized AI performance, including some protocol operation protocols for AI multimodality and AI agents.
It can be seen that AI+Crypto is very challenging. Some cloud computing power, underlying co-processing and other platforms are still in the bottoming stage, and we cannot rush. (Detailed technical analysis will be disclosed in Sahara's further technical documents)
Although AI in the traditional Internet field has not yet been able to replicate the entrepreneurial wave of the mobile Internet, perhaps due to various reasons such as the poor economic environment, oligopoly, lack of innovation, and immature implementation scenarios, we sincerely hope that the solutions provided by the Crypto framework and industry builders can become one of the variables that can break the deadlock.
