Unlocking the Power of AI and Web3: A New Era of Development

Recall the middle-school writing exercise where you had to describe your favorite cookie to an extraterrestrial being, ensuring you covered all senses. This task, although seemingly simple, is actually quite challenging. Describing something in a way that allows others to form a clear picture requires a great deal of effort. Let's attempt to describe Matheus Pagani, the founder and CEO of Venture Miner. He is a male with light caramel skin and dark brown hair, which, despite being cut short, still reveals its curly nature. His thick, dark brown beard connects to his mustache, and his eyes are a deep brown behind thin wire glasses. His bottom lip protrudes slightly, giving him an air of confidence without appearing arrogant. Are you able to visualize him? How confident are you in your mental image? Oh, and he's Brazilian. Got it? Let's see how Matheus Pagani actually looks. Does your mental image match the real thing? When I mentioned he was Brazilian, did you imagine him in bright colors and a feathered headdress? If so, it's time to check your bias, as this is similar to how AI thinks. During the AI2Web3 Bootcamp in NYC, Pagani showed examples generated by AI, such as Brazilians having fun, which were often stereotypical and inaccurate. The bootcamp, organized by Pagani and Build City, brought together 59 participants of varying skill levels to learn how to combine AI and Web3 to create useful products and services. Pagani used the middle-school assignment to explain how AI has made significant progress in recent years. Initially, AI was trained primarily on text data, which has its limitations. However, by combining text information with visual data, we get a more comprehensive picture. The bootcamp focused on hands-on experience with both AI and blockchain technology to understand their core components. According to Pagani, these skills will soon be relevant to people from all backgrounds, including engineers, tech users, journalists, artists, and doctors. "We want to bring together brilliant minds from diverse backgrounds to work with AI and Web3, as the intersection of their multiple perspectives can uncover new use cases that we wouldn't envision with a specialized Web3 or AI mindset alone," Pagani said. "Nowadays, we have tools that enable non-technical enthusiasts to build functional applications and systems using '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." What makes the intersection of AI and Web3 so exciting is the potential to build complex projects in a short amount of time without prior technical experience. AI can source entire codebases with the right prompt, and the crypto industry is developing tools to make development at the intersection of both more intuitive and accessible. For instance, Coinbase launched AgentKit in November, a framework that allows developers to build AI agents with their own crypto wallets, enabling them to interact autonomously with blockchain networks. This could be used to build a squad of agents that can monitor markets and execute trades automatically based on predefined rules and guardrails. "One day, we'll have AI agents own their own cars and operate their own taxi service that gets paid by customers in crypto and then uses that crypto to purchase repairs," Lincoln Murr, associate product manager at Coinbase, told the attendees. Coinbase currently has a grants program for building with AgentKit. "What you build doesn't have to be useful; we have a bias towards cool stuff," Murr said, hoping to inspire innovative projects and applications. Ora Network also has an interesting model for developers looking to build AI-enabled Web3 applications or vice versa. The network allows developers to utilize current large language models, including Meta's Llama3 and Stable Diffusion, and also enables them to build their own models and offer an initial model offering (IMO) to crowdfund its continued development. "It's kind of winner-takes-all right now in AI, but with this model, we're allowing the crowdfunding of AI building and training, so people can have a share of the models, which is empowering if we think these models will run society in a decade," Alec James, partnerships and growth lead at Ora, said during the bootcamp. Near, Fleek, and Alora were also among the companies that sponsored the bootcamp and presented their various tools and programs for building at the intersection of these two innovative technologies. On the final day of the bootcamp, nine teams presented working prototypes for projects that blended Web3 and AI. These projects ranged from AI assistants meant to help with gift-giving, ordering delivery, or diversifying financial portfolios to applications that help crypto operators create memecoins with high virality potential. Jackie Joya, a participant who had flown in from San Francisco, said the bootcamp inspired her to continue building. With a background in animal science, Joya is still new to engineering but was amazed at how much a novice could build with the available tools. Other participants, across all skill levels, shared similar experiences. Choudhury Imtiaz, a market researcher from Bangladesh, who is in the U.S. on an H-1B1 Visa waiting for a placement, hadn't heard of Web3 before the bootcamp but was able to pitch a team project on the last day. Isayah Culbertson, who has worked on both crypto and AI projects separately, learned skills for building with both and believes this combination has the potential to change the world for the better. "I see the combination accelerating the research and development of many fields, while also allowing for a more equitable distribution of wealth generated from that R&D," he said.