Arif Khan on the Future of Crypto-AI

The vibrant world of “Crypto + AI” has seemingly emerged out of thin air over the last 12 months, but don’t tell that to Alethea AI CEO Arif Khan. He has been here since 2017, when he was part of the core team of SingularityNET, one of the OG AI+Web3 projects. (This was before Web3 was even called Web3.)

According to Khan, decentralized AI is more than just hype, abstraction, and a trendy trend; It is of critical importance and is the future. And it can make our daily lives easier. “I think within five years, we will have autonomous on-chain AI agents processing crypto transactions and managing large parts of our lives,” predicts Khan. “Managing our financial lives, emails, and administrative hassles like paying bills in 5 to 10 years. This can be done on-chain and locally.”

Alethea AI CEO Arif Khan is a speaker at the Consensus festival, held this year between May 29-31 in Austin, Texas.

Ahead of Consensus, where he spoke on the AI ​​Stage, Khan shares his vision for how Alethea will help unlock that future, why decentralized AI is so important, and why at Consensus it’s “fun to hang out with the editorial team and journalists.” (This last one is a It may deserve verification, but we appreciate the sentiment.)

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What is your prediction for Alethea?

Arif Khan: Our primary goal is to create a Web3 infrastructure for productive artificial intelligence. Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles, the Web3 world and the AI ​​world. [ARIF shares his screen on our Zoom to show the below image.] The Web3 world is a scarcity-driven world, and the productive AI world is all about abundance. So at the intersection of combining those two things, you get what we call the AI ​​protocol; Here any productive asset (whether an AI character or AI agent) is tracked, monetized. There is an origin around it.

Can you give an example?

Our first collaboration was before ChatGPT became popular, when GPT-3 was still in private beta. Let’s say we created a character or AI agent in version 0.1. We called it Alice, a smart NFT. An NFT that can talk, learn, interact and communicate with you.

So it’s a work of art, but you can also interact and communicate with it. So it is no longer a static image, but there is an artificial intelligence component. We’ve come a long way since then, but our goal is to build this ethically and openly, and that’s going to be really important.

In five years, we will have autonomous on-chain AI agents processing crypto transactions and managing large parts of our lives.

The story continues

Why is decentralized AI so important to you? What does Web3 bring to the table?

One of the principles of Web3 is ownership. You know the meme: Not your keys, not your coins. So it’s very simple to map this out and look at it from an AI perspective: If it’s not your data, if it’s not your models, if it’s not your inputs and if you’re not part of the equation, it’s not yours.

If you can bring ownership into the design structure of what you’re building, then you’ve kind of reversed the power dynamic. And that means, for example, at a very, very basic level, if you’re a creator, you own an asset, or you own some aspect of your words, and you’ve licensed that, or it’s part of that. When you become part of a chain of origin, you are now part of an equation where you will receive some compensation for anything trained on that. Doing this at scale is very complex.

Is it fair to say that the output of an Alethea model may be similar to the output of something centralized like OpenAI, but the underlying basis is very different and done in a decentralized way, resulting in benefits that are harder to see on the surface?

I think it’s correct in terms of orientation, but I’ll zoom in [and correct] a field. I was one of the first angel investors in the team that created Stable Diffusion. And this was a significant leap forward in the open source approach. At the time, it was the only model that could compete with the DALL-E, a commercial model produced by a larger company. He can punch well above his weight class. Created by the open source community and open source researchers.

What I’m trying to say is that at every level, whether it’s at the GPU level, the model level, the agent level, if you operate with decentralization and a clear ethos, you have a tremendous opportunity to innovate. You are not dependent on central control.

Ah, if I’m hearing you correctly, are you saying that if you move it further from the center you’re actually more likely to get a better output?

Yes. Possibility of getting better output The word “probably” is very important because you will see a lot of open source bugs on a regular basis.

Open source is hard!

Yes, hard. But it’s an integral part of the process. You get some great output, but also some crappy output.

What can you tell us about Alethea’s partnership with Amazon Web Services?

So our ecosystem has three parts. There are GPU clusters, there are model side, and then there are brokers.

On the GPU side, we started working with different providers to diversify GPU access. AWS has been a very helpful partner in helping us test and scale these GPUs. We continue to diversify our GPU sources, and this has also been an opportunity to learn from an amazing team.

Give us an AI prediction. How might the world look different in, say, five years, thanks to artificial intelligence? Or is it 10?

I think within five years we will have autonomous on-chain AI agents processing crypto transactions and managing large parts of our lives. Managing our financial lives, emails, and administrative hassles like paying bills in 5 to 10 years. This can be done on-chain and locally.

It’s a two-parter: What excites you most about AI and what scares you the most about AI?

What excites me most is the potential for democratization, such as the opportunity for each of us to have our own AI agent.

What scares me is that with that comes a huge responsibility, right? Fire can warm a house or burn down a village. So we have to be careful how we use it.

Other than Alethea and Singularity, what do you see as the most promising projects in the Crypto + AI space?

Morpheus is a very interesting open source project. I really like the way they position themselves. The other one that is very interesting to look at is Bittensor. From an application perspective, they’ve created a really interesting economy where people can plug into the application layer, the GPU layer, and the model layer. And I’m sure there are many others I missed; There are so many amazing entrepreneurs and community builders out there.

Let’s finish with some thoughts on consensus. Do you have any favorite memories from past conferences?

I remember meeting Michael Casey at an after-dinner event at Consensus in New York six or seven years ago. And there was a physicist or mathematician; Eric Weinstein, who is very popular right now with Joe Rogan. He was discussing statistics and making a controversial point. It was like a melding of minds and it was so amazing to be in the presence of thinkers who were truly pushing the boundaries.

Favorite parties or events at Consensus?

There are so many, but I think it’s always fun to hang out with the editorial team and journalists.

Why should I thank you!

Really fun group of people. So I try to follow them wherever they go. They’re going to the Cool Kids Party, right?

I’ve never been mistaken for Cool Kid, but we’ll take it. Thanks and see you in Austin!