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Arif Khan on the future of crypto-AI
It seems like the vibrant world of “Crypto + AI” has arisen out of nowhere in the last 12 months, but don’t tell anyone Arif Khan, CEO of Alethea AI. He’s been here since 2017, when he was part of the core team of SingularityNET, one of the OG AI + Web3 projects. (It existed before Web3 was even called Web3.)
For Khan, decentralized AI is more than just hype, more than an abstraction, and more than a trendy trend: it’s fundamental, and it’s the future. And it can make our daily lives easier. “I think in five years we will have autonomous AI agents on-chain making crypto transactions and managing a lot of our lives,” Khan predicts. “In 5-10 years, we will be managing our financial lives, our emails, and the administrative issues of things like paying bills. All of this can be done on-chain and natively.”
Arif Khan, CEO of Alethea AI, is one of this year’s speakers Consent festival in Austin, Texas, May 29-31.
Ahead of Consensus, where he speaks on stage about AI, 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”. (That last one might deserve a fact check, but we appreciate the sentiment.)
The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
What is your vision for Alethea?
Arif Khan: Our main goal is to create a Web3 infrastructure for generative AI. 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-focused world, while the generative AI world is abundance-focused. So it’s at the intersection of combining those two things that you get what we call the AI protocol, where any generative asset, whether it’s an AI character or an AI agent, is tracked and monetized. There’s a provenance around it.
We started our first collaboration long before ChatGPT became popular, when GPT-3 was still in private beta. We created an AI character or agent, version 0.1, let’s say. We called it Alice, which is a smart NFT. An NFT that can talk to you, learn, interact and communicate.
So this is a work of art, but at the same time you can interact and communicate with it. So it’s no longer a static image, it has an AI component. We’ve come a long way since then, but the goal is to build this in a way that’s ethical and open, and that’s going to be really important.
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 it out and look at it from an AI perspective: if it’s not your data, not your models, not your input, and if you’re not part of the equation, it’s not yours.
If you can build ownership into the design structure of what you’re building, then you’re kind of reversing the power dynamic. And that means, for example, at a very, very basic level, it means that if you’re a creator, if you own an asset, or if you own aspects of your words – and if you’ve licensed it, or it’s part of a chain of provenance, you are now part of an equation where for everything that is trained on it, you get some level of compensation across the board. This is very complex to achieve on a large scale.
It’s fair to say that the production of an Alethea model might be similar to the output of something centralized, like OpenAI, but the foundations are very different and built in a decentralized way, which confers benefits that are harder to see on the surface?
I think you’re right, but I’ll just zoom in [and correct] a zone. I was one of the first angel investors on the team that created Stable Diffusion. And it was a quantum leap for the open source approach. At the time it was the only model capable of competing with DALL-E, a commercial model built by a larger company. He could punch well above his weight class. It was built by the open source community and open source researchers.
What I’m trying to say is that at every single level, whether at the GPU level, whether at the model level, whether at the agent level – at every single level, if you use decentralization and open ethics, you have a huge opportunity to innovate. You’re not stuck with centralized control.
Ah, so if I understand correctly, you are saying that by decentralizing you are more likely to get better results?
Yes. And the word “likely” to produce better results is crucial, because you will regularly see many open source failures.
Yes, it’s difficult. But this is an integral part of the process. You get terrible results along with great results.
What can you tell us about Alethea’s partnership with Amazon Web Services?
So, there are three parts to our ecosystem. There are the GPU clusters, there is the model side and then there are the agents.
On the GPU side, we have started working with several vendors to diversify GPU access. And AWS has been a very helpful partner in helping us test and scale these GPUs. We continue to diversify our GPU sources and it was also an opportunity to learn from an amazing team.
Give us an AI prediction. How might the world look different thanks to artificial intelligence in, say, five years? Or 10?
I think in five years we will have autonomous on-chain AI agents making crypto transactions and managing much of our lives. In 5-10 years, we will be managing our financial lives, our emails, and the administrative hassles of things like paying bills. This can be done on-chain and natively.
In two parts: What excites you most about AI, and what terrifies you most about AI?
What excites me most is its democratizing potential, such as the opportunity for each of us to have our own AI agent.
What terrifies me is that with this comes enormous responsibility, right? Fire can heat a house or it can burn a village. So we just have to be careful how we use it.
Outside of Alethea and Singularity, what do you consider the most promising projects in Crypto + AI?
Morpheus is a very interesting open source project. I really like the way they position themselves. And the other one that was very interesting to watch is Bittensor. From an application perspective, they’ve created a really interesting economics, where people can plug in at the application layer, at the GPU layer, at the model layer. And I’m sure there are many more that I miss; there are so many amazing entrepreneurs and community builders.
We close with some reflections on Consensus. Any favorite memories from past conferences?
I remember meeting Michael Casey six or seven years ago at Consensus in New York, at an after-dinner event. And there was a physicist or a mathematician: Eric Weinstein, who is now quite popular on Joe Rogan. And he was joking about the statistics and making some controversial points. It was like a melding of minds, and it was great to be in the presence of thinkers who are really pushing the boundaries.
Favorite parties or events at Consensus?
There are many, but I think it’s always fun to hang out with the editorial staff and journalists.
It’s a 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 a Cool Kid, but we’ll take that. Thanks and see you in Austin!