By: Alpaca
Published: March 23, 2023
We believe there are two paths we can take: one where AI is controlled by a few powerful entities, and another where it is accessible to everyone and the capabilities are distributed more uniformly.
Which path will you choose to contribute to?
What is Point Network
For those who are new to Point Network, our primary goal is to create a completely decentralized internet, also known as web 3.0 (the real one), that is free from censorship and mass surveillance. In pursuit of this vision, we have developed Point Network - an implementation of a truly decentralized internet - as well as Point Browser (a web3 browser that is completely disconnected from the old internet), Point Social, Point Mail, and other decentralized applications.We have been the first to create the full architecture for decentralizing the internet. Now we'll be doing the same for AI.
Point Alpaca
Many people don’t yet realize how fortunate the public is to have Meta’s model LLaMA publicly leaked (some say it was the plan from the start, but this doesn't square with the fact that Meta legal team is sending around DMCA takedowns). Regardless, we’re glad that something useful came out of Mark Zuckerberg's empire for once.As a result, large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment: individuals across the globe are coming together to improve these models.
A team at Stanford has given LLaMA superpowers by fine-tuning it on a synthetic instruction dataset into Stanford Alpaca, to behave more like ChatGPT. Although they did not release the weights, our team successfully replicated the experiment and released the weights. The result is Point Alpaca 7B.
We created a simple, user-friendly, character-based frontend, modeled after Character.AI (a startup that is now valued at $1B+ after just one year). Instead of taking a year, our team had to have the frontend up and running in just one day since the model release and is scaling it as thousands of people sign up to test it and the word spreads.
It's clear that if interest in the frontend continues to grow, our small team will be unable to scale indefinitely. Fortunately, as a web3 startup, we have the perfect solution, which falls under the umbrella codename of Point Transcend - access to AI services reimagined for web3.
Point Transcend
On Point Transcend (which will be found at the transcend.point domain when we release it on top of the Point 2 architecture), we can create a decentralized market of AI services by bringing together three key components:Decentralized market for computation. Anyone can offer their computing resources to the network (GPUs, CPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, storage, bandwidth) and receive micropayments in real time for the services. The payment will be, naturally, in POINT tokens.
Decentralized market for models. We can also create a decentralized model marketplace where anyone can upload their competitive models and receive payment in POINT tokens for their use. These could include language models, image generation models, voice recognition, or any other type of model, whether a new base model or a fine-tune.
End-to-end Privacy. In future versions, R&D efforts in homomorphic encryption promise to achieve the goal of complete privacy in AI, where even those who are running the models on their hardware won't know what inputs they are computing on.
This market will also allow us to run models for our users. Our Alpaca frontend and other applications will fully migrate to web3, existing as decentralized applications accessible from Point Browser.
Futuristic applications
The potential applications of AI are boundless, and we are already witnessing innovative experiments like the HustleGPT challenge, where individuals are using language models to generate revenue. We expect that these experiments are just the beginning, and we even anticipate a future where Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) led purely by AIs compete with each other to create more value.As a company with experience at the intersection of Web3 and AI, plus having all the necessary foundation already, we are uniquely positioned to build the infrastructure for this exciting future, and we cannot wait to see what the community will create on top of it.
One of the key factors in unlocking the full potential of AI is the ability to train larger and more sophisticated models. With your support, we can train and open-source larger multimodal models and optimize the training process (right now, we're fine-tuning Point Alpaca 13B and 30B).
Who knows, perhaps one day, this could lead to the creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with superhuman abilities - the Holy Grail of AI. There are not many tickets to potential AGI, and although we are not saying we will be the ones to hold the winning ticket, looking at the current pool of participants in this lottery (their disregard for transparency, their preferential treatment in sharing the access to the *most* powerful models with their friends first, their perverse understanding of AI safety as refusing to write a poem about Donald Trump rather than making sure the AI doesn't kill us when it becomes superhumanly smarter), it make sense to extend this lottery pool as wide as possible.
Being a startup producing Open Source software is a tough, but rewarding path. Sign up for updates, share your ideas with others in our Telegram community, and join us on this exciting journey towards a more decentralized, equitable and accessible future, powered by Point Network technology.
Disclaimer: this press release is partially written by an AI. Header image by Midjourney.