Future of Work: Get to Know Sapien and Navigate
In September 2024, Yield Guild Games (YGG) launched Future of Work (FoW), its latest vertical focused on enabling the YGG community to explore decentralized earning opportunities in emerging technologies at the intersection of Web3. FoW has introduced community members to AI and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) platforms where they can complete gamified tasks for rewards.
Newcomers to the YGG ecosystem can start engaging with FoW partner projects in Season 8 of the Guild Advancement Program (GAP).
“The most important part here is gamifying the experience of data labeling,” said YGG co-founder Beryl Li during a discussion panel at the YGG Play Summit in Manila, Philippines, last November. “A lot of us really like learning how to sort data. But to onboard a large number of users to take part in the future of AI, we need to simplify those tasks. We’ve used our questing platform as a way to gamify this task by turning it into a task-based quest.”
YGG has released new episodes for its video series on FoW, where Beryl is joined by YGG Future of Work Head Trish Rosal and Web3 Metaversity Co-lead Bianca Cruz to showcase the benefits of contributing to the Sapien and Navigate platforms.
Experience Gamified AI Data Labeling with Sapien
Sapien is a two-sided marketplace for AI data labeling services that leans on communities and individuals, rather than salaried employees, to take on the important task of labeling data sets and preparing them for use within the AI ecosystem. Since partnering with Sapien, YGG has helped them label a considerable amount of data, leaning on the skills of the YGG community to identify pieces of clothing, vehicles, and unusual sounds within its raw data sets.
“AI data is just like oil. It starts out as raw material, raw data, and then you have to structure and refine that data, just like a refinery for oil before you can put it in a training model to make it useful,” said Sapien co-founder Trevor Koverko. “Sapien helps with that second step. Like an oil refinery, we help structure data.”
Sapien has attracted broad support since its introduction to the YGG community in GAP Season 6. With YGG’s massive guild network, Sapien has expanded its roster of participants to 80,000 and counting, spanning over 165 countries.
Navigate Your Way into Tomorrow
Navigate positions itself as the first truly Web3-native big data platform on the internet, empowering users to take back ownership of their data. In GAP Season 8, participants can explore Navigate’s retro game-style Data Quest platform and its growing collection of AI data labeling sets with varying requirements.
One of the sets requires questers to identify the political alignments of users sharing their opinions on the 2024 US elections. Players can categorize text based on emotional tone to help build out sentiment-testing algorithms and train AI models to facilitate more accurate forecasting in prediction markets, where people can trade contracts based on specific outcomes. The data can later be used to forecast events like stock market performance, box office success, product launches, and market trends. Areas like technology, public health, and scientific research can also utilize similar data to drive innovation.
Data Quest has expanded into DePIN through a browser extension that passively collects data on each contributor’s internet usage. Contributors can select specific apps to connect to the extension and have complete control over the information they share. In return, they receive points that can be used within the Navigate ecosystem. The data fuels the development of AI applications like large language models (LLMs), AI-powered search engines, and self-driving vehicles.
“Data is the primitive of everything that we do in tech. All of the big tech companies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc, all started doing one thing. If you zoom out today and you look at what they do, they’re all big data companies,” said Navigate CEO Ali Husain. “The idea here is to be able to collect high-quality data. Our hypothesis is that as technology advances, the more high-quality data we have, the more ways to monetize it will be unlocked in the future.”
The Future of Work in an AI-Driven World
With FoW, YGG is establishing itself at the forefront of emerging technologies and addressing some of the most pressing concerns facing the tech world. YGG’s collaboration with companies like Sapien and Navigate empowers its community to take ownership of their data and reinforces the importance of humanity in the growing AI economy. Through these gamified tasks, anyone can earn additional income, contribute to the advancement of AI, and level up their skills.
Sign up for GAP Season 8 and get started with YGG’s latest selection of Future of Work quests.
Follow YGG Future of Work on X for the latest updates on decentralized earning opportunities.
Follow Trish, Beryl and Bianca to learn more about how YGG is using Web3 for its social impact initiatives.