Sahara, the latest startup to merge the worlds of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, says it will help workers and businesses get rewarded for knowledge, expertise and data in the age of AI.
The Los Angeles-based startup has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Polychain Capital. The round also saw participation from Samsung Next, Matrix Partners, Motherson Group, and Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of the Polygon blockchain ecosystem.
AI products like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are trained on large amounts of data and improve over time as a result of user feedback. Sahara co-founder Sean Ren says his startup is building a suite of products that directly rewards users, data providers, and AI trainers who help develop the tools. AI models typically have very different returns than current models. For the company that created it.
“Users provide highly personalized feedback to AI systems to improve them,” said Ren, who started Sahara after spending seven years as an AI researcher at the University of Southern California (USC). , and is a life member of the school's computer science department. Faculty. Ren told CoinDesk in an interview that because people are happy to use a free service, they tend to be “perfectly comfortable sharing that data.” But recently, “we're seeing AI improve so much that it's starting to replace people's jobs.”
Ren says he doesn't think today's AI giants have an incentive to compensate users. When it comes to finding solutions to the growing problem of people losing their livelihoods to AI, “I think we need to solve it at the root with some kind of disruptive technology,” Ren said.
According to Len's biography on USC's website, he: Allen AI Institute – Founded by philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who works on machine common sense and previously served as a data science advisor at Snapchat. His academic research “aims to build generalizable natural language processing (NLP) systems that can handle a variety of language tasks and situations in order to extend the scope of the model's generality,” his bio says. is written.
The startup's other co-founder, Tyler Chou, studied at the University of California, Berkeley and worked as an investment director at Binance Labs in 2022 and 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.
One of Sahara's first products, Sahara Knowledge Agent (KA), will be a customizable AI agent for individuals and businesses. The main difference of Sahara KA compared to other AI agents is the monetization method. Professionals and companies that train Sahara KA can be compensated directly for training the model.
The feature is said to use blockchain networks as a way to track data and reward contributors while protecting privacy. It will be built using Sahara Data, another of the company's initial products, which will provide “high-value data services for training AI models and address security and privacy concerns in data processing. '' the company said in a statement.
Sahara said its technology has already been adopted by Microsoft, MIT, USC and others, and two enterprise customers have already started using Sahara KA services. Ren said Sahara's first products will begin to be widely available to the public in the second or third quarter of this year.
“I think the economics of the Web2 AI industry are kind of collapsing, and we are working to ensure that each stakeholder plays their role in this new ecosystem in the Sahara,” Ren said. Told.
“Professional experts can use agent technology, for example, to really expand their knowledge and monetize their knowledge to reach more people,” he said. “For example, for the vast majority of laypeople who don't have very strong expertise or expertise, they can contribute to more general AI agents, what we call public knowledge bases or public-based models,” he said. added. .
If the model makes money…
In either case, contributors get a “share of the model,” Ren said. If people pay money to use the model and the model becomes profitable in the future, then the shareholders make a profit.
Sahara’s seed raise comes amid a moment at the intersection of AI and cryptocurrencies.
Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency startup from Open AI founder Sam Altman, has been consistently grabbing headlines for its controversial retinal scanning approach to verifying digital identities in the age of AI. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and blockchain thought leader, is widely quoted as saying: Recent blog posts Other public statements exploring how AI and cryptocurrencies can complement each other.
The sector is also attracting interest on a dollar basis. In addition to some recent funding for AI-related cryptocurrency companies, there has been a recent surge in AI-related crypto tokens. Remarkably, they Outperformed CoinDesk 20 The index, the largest cryptocurrency benchmark, follows last month's news of strong quarterly profits from leading AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA).
