NuNet Private Alpha Part 1: Fake News Warning Showcase Application
This is Part 1 of the mini-series of posts announcing and explaining the private Alpha release of NuNet. We start the series by introducing the showcase application that runs on NuNet’s Alpha and is constructed from SingularityNET Services. Full and current description of the NuNet private Alpha release and its main components is available on our website.
NuNet platform private Alpha allows software algorithms like SingularityNET’s AI agents to run in a distributed environment and provides real results to end-users. It is named ‘private’ because it uses a private instance of Ethereum blockchain for the demonstration of the token compensations and is directed to the developer community.
As a part of the platform private Alpha, we are releasing a showcase application. The extension is a graphical user interface to the backend that is constructed from SingularityNET AI Services available in the SingularityNET marketplace running on NuNet. Our main motivation in building this showcase application was to demonstrate how NuNet can construct application-specific service meshes for any AI service and business logic, rather than a specific Artificial Intelligence algorithm that warns about fake news.
Fake news warning application is a Chromium browser extension — it works on Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers. For this showcase release, the blockchain components run on a private instance of Ethereum, not the mainnet, and the tokens that are used for settling transactions are not fungible. This allows us to demonstrate the software interacting with Ethereum and its smart contracts, while sidestepping the fees and congestion that would be required to run on Ethereum mainnet.
Fake news is a strange side-effect of a media environment centered around pay-per-click advertising. Ad networks such as Facebook pay a small amount for every time someone clicks on a link, and in mid-2016, some young folks in Macedonia realised there was a simple way to get breaking news that would drive those clicks and earn money: simply make the news up. They made good money throwing up stories like ‘Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President’, and the modern fake news era was born.
Artificial Intelligence excels at detecting patterns in texts and classifying texts at speeds that far exceed human ability. The fake news warning browser extension sends the content of the browser tab to a NuNet service orchestrator, which calls upon two specific services running on NuNet platform: a stance-detection algorithm and a neural-network based binary classification algorithm. Together, these come up with a score rating the likelihood that an article contains fake news.
NuNet is a platform that connects hardware owners and providers to entrepreneurs, developers and data providers, therefore our aim is not to develop end-user apps, but rather to provide all participants of the platform with adequate infrastructure to build whatever they desire, collectively. The showcase application demonstrates just one combination of AI services that could be run on NuNet, and shows how different algorithms can be put together to create a hardware and software service mesh. A service mesh like the backend of Fake News Warning app can be deployed on NuNet when developers:
- Declare a program graph for the application. This defines the AI services and the program components;
- Make sure that all AI Services in the program graph are onboarded onto the SingularityNET platform and marketplace;
- Build a frontend of the application that users can interact with.
The open-source algorithms of the stance detection algorithm and binary classification algorithm are registered as services on SingularityNET, and physically run on NuNet’s hardware mesh. The frontend in this case is a browser extension that, upon activation, sends the contents of the current browser tab to the backend defined in the program graph.
SingularityNET provides the AI algorithms; application developers create application logic and program graph; NuNet deploys it on the decentralized hardware mesh. With the private Alpha, we will release an onboarding script that allows users to make their Linux devices part of this hardware mesh (stay tuned for the Part 2 of the present series for more about the design principles of private Alpha and early community developer / compute provider guidelines).
While NuNet has developed some of the AI Services that compose the backend of the present showcase application, we will predominantly be running algorithms and services developed by third parties, via integration with SingularityNET platform and larger ecosystem. With the Fake News Warning application, we demonstrate the flexible interface between NuNet and SingularityNET, that allows the community to develop, improve, evolve and execute applications in a collaborative and democratic process of sharing resources and intelligence.
NuNet’s architecture allows the algorithms to be replaced without affecting the frontend. If necessary, the AI behind the Fake News Warning can be replaced. The community of developers may develop an improved algorithm, and NuNet allows it to be easily integrated into the application.
We are excited to launch this fully-fledged demonstration of service mesh running on community provided hardware, a milestone in the creation of a decentralized economy of decentralized computing. Private Alpha release of the NuNet platform is specifically directed towards the community of developers and early contributors of compute resources in order to build a test network for bootstrapping this global network. We want to engage our community in this collective effort from day one and therefore have setup a the support e-mail and the Developer Exchange for technical support and discussions. We will build the future together!
Many thanks for being part of this. More announcements and demos are coming for you soon, therefore stay tuned.
About NuNet
NuNet lets anyone share and monetize their computing resources, turning cloud computing power from a centralized service into an open protocol powered by blockchain. Find out more via:
