Wil Bown is the founder of Neureal, one of DAIA’s partner companies. The DAIA team interviewed Wil about his background, current projects and why he chose to join DAIA.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Wil — could you please tell us about your background?
I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on October 29, 1969 — just two hours before the internet was born. While many may not consider Salt Lake City to be a tech hub, it really is — there were only four original internet nodes, and one of them was there.
Growing up, I was immersed in innovation — not only was this city host to one of the original nodes of the internet — but it also gave birth to technology like the television and virtual reality. Between this environment and my own passion for technology, I began getting involved in AI very young — it always felt intrinsic to me.
What drove you to pursue AI and decentralized technology?
AI has evolved in a major way since I first became interested in it, but I’ve always felt that I could see deeper into it than most people, and consequently find myself teaching others about what is truly happening with the technology. I’ve found that the best way to help people understand it is to create things or to offer experiential presentations. For example, I would teach people about Bitcoin by actually giving it away.
I was running the local Bitcoin meetup here in Utah right around the time that Mt. Gox became popular — and there was suddenly a huge rush of people getting really interested in Bitcoin. And the upswing in popularity got me thinking that perhaps we could use this technology to bring AI to more people.
And did you?
Now — I was never really a hacker (I would consider myself more of a cyberpunk), but still I thought it would be interesting to create a virus that would automatically upload AI onto peoples machines to help them with repetitive tasks. I thought that this could be a solution because most people were afraid of AI — but maybe this might help them to overcome that. I ultimately did not move forward with that idea though, because I realized that Bitcoin could give people the incentive needed to get involved with AI.
Another one of our main goals with this was to do something about the amount of waste that there is in hashing power. I saw that there was just this massive amount of computing power that was being used. We wanted to do something different with it and believed that we could do this by leveraging AI. For context, this was around the time when Vitalik started becoming popular but Ethereum had not yet been created.
How did this lead you to Neureal?
One of the things about the Bitcoin Consensus Algorithm is that its calculation is hard to do, but easy to check — and we realized that forecasting the future is kind of like that too, we can’t predict it, but hindsight is always 20/20.
So we decided to try and create a consensus but wound up landing on the Oracle Problem, so we ultimately continued with Proof of Stake, adding on new transactions and lining up incentives in the network in a way that would give value to the person providing the data, incentivizing them to not mess it up.
What we have created with Neureal is essentially the first decentralized protocol that produces distributed artificial intelligence using blockchain technology. The Neureal Network allows idle computing power to be utilized and commercialized to analyze big data and predict the future, while rewarding miners for the accuracy of their predictions.
How did you get involved with DAIA?
I decided 6 years ago that I was going to try my best to contribute to the creation of these exponential technologies that will transform our world. I worked to spread the word and founded a small community with the Neureal project. In DAIA, I feel like we have now found an even greater worldwide community of like-minded thinkers and doers. I am excited to join and leverage our collective efforts to take our technologies to the next level.
Are you seeing any major trends in the industry now?
Awareness and engagement have grown tremendously — 5 years ago, you could count the people publicly talking about these topics on one hand. Both AI and decentralized technologies are incredibly hard for most people to understand and the intersection of them both was alien for everyone.
ICOs started getting a lot of people interested in the space, but in the past year since, I see a few projects coming through with actual, real-world use.
There are a lot of things that are missing in the architectures that people are creating, one of these components being online learning systems. As an example, Deep Mind just came out with an architecture called For the Win (FTW), which is a reinforcement learning system. The issue is that while they are doing charts and screenshots to prove its capability, it only shows you a single piece of time. Whereas as humans, we spend years taking in data from the world and learning about it and so we are always learning. Now people are taking this idea and implementing it in AI.
This coming year I believe will be the time when we start making the Googles and Facebooks of decentralized AI. It’s the perfect time to start an alliance like DAIA because only those serious about creating will likely join and contribute.
Is there anything else you are working on that has you really excited?
We just launched a proof of concept called Metaversal, and have successfully launched an AI in VR by creating an OpenAI adapter for High Fidelity. I am very excited about it. It means that I will be able to really meet my AI babies for the first time, and when they make breakthroughs in learning I will be able to interact with them live. Anyone will be able to interact with and get to know them in High Fidelity, you can check out the proof of concept here: https://highfidelity.com/places/Neureal
Plus, since this is open source — anyone with some programming experience can copy what we did and create their own AI in VR!
Right now they are living on a high-end gaming computer that sits in my office, and they conveniently produce heat and keep my office warm in the cold Utah winter weather. But not everyone has access to or wants to invest in or take care of that kind of hardware and that’s mainly where decentralized blockchain comes into play. It offers an alternative way to get resources for your AI with no middlemen, making it more cost effective and safer.
We are also creating a “DAIICO” based on the Ethereum platform. This is simply an innovative ICO smart contract that should solve some of the problems plaguing the industry. Among other things it will have an automatic peg to the dollar based on the only proven decentralized stablecoin, DAI (from the MakerDAO community, not to be confused with decentralized AI). It has refundable milestone tracking built-in to give the foundation better accountability. It will also reduce the opportunity cost associated with the price of ETH rising and at the same time limit the downside market losses by using a managed CDP debt instrument. We will make this code, system, and support available to all the DAIA projects that want to use it.
We are creating an Ethereum based version of Neureal while also keeping the plan to transition to our own blockchain in the future. This will considerably shorten our timeline to a useful product that will integrate and bring immediate value to the large Ethereum ecosystem and the DAIA community projects. This ties into the DAIICO project by offering automated intelligence to the sale contract so that it can make better asset management decisions in a decentralized way.
Learn more about Neureal:
· Introducing DerpQ, an AI in VR
