1/ @PanteraCapital co-led the $43M investment round into @SaharaLabsAI. Sahara AI’s mission is to create a more open, equitable, and collaborative AI economy that is as easy as possible to participate in. Let’s dive into their vision.
2/ The current AI stack has more or less settled into the following distinct layers:
• Data collection and Labeling
• Data is gathered from various sources and must comply with licensing requirements. Data is labeled based on the task at hand.
• Model Training and serving
• Data is fed into the model, which adjusts its internal parameters (weights) to minimize errors. This is computationally expensive and time-consuming.
• AI agent creation and deployment
• User experience of creating an AI agent typically involves using tools like TensorFlow, requiring technical expertise.
• Compute resources
• Model Training requires expensive processing.
3/ Companies are slowly trying to integrate all of these pieces together, but face challenges because of its technical complexity. In the web2 world, each piece of the AI stack requires its own security standard, distributed database, backend integrations, and monetization strategy, among others.
The end goals are clear: create an efficient data collection infrastructure that seamlessly integrates into model training, allow everyday users to tailor, train, and serve their own models, and decentralize the costs and rewards in order to sustainably scale compute resources.
4/ Sahara’s platform serves as a one-stop shop for all AI development needs throughout the entire AI lifecycle—from data collection and labeling, to model training and serving, AI agent creation and deployment, multi-agent communication, AI asset trading, and crowdsourcing of AI resources. By democratizing the AI development process and lowering barriers to entry found in existing systems, Sahara AI provides equal access for individuals, businesses and communities to co-build the future of AI.
5/ Sahara’s goal is to make it easy to participate in this AI economy. The steps developers take are:
Seasoned AI developers:
• Developers can use Sahara SDK & API to interact with any part of the AI stack
New AI developers:
• Through a no-code/low-code environment, developers can create and deploy AI assets through intuitive interfaces and pre-built templates.
AI training:
To participate in AI model training, users will simply go to a website saharalabs.ai/solutions/applications/ai-marketplace where they can complete AI training tasks, from solving basic math to describing short videos, and get compensated with tradeable tokens.
6/ The steps users take are:
AI users:
• Users can easily use an AI agent through an intuitive UI. Users have the flexibility to purchase licenses for access and further development or even trade shares of the AI assets.
Corporations:
• Corporations can also create AI Agents (or “Business Agents”) trained on their own proprietary data, and since the system runs on the Sahara Blockchain, is significantly cheaper due to decentralized AI agent generation and serving costs
• Corporations can also pay to generate Sahara Data, which melds AI Automatic Labeling and Human Labeling in order to efficiently create high-quality, privacy preserving, multimodal datasets.
7/ The Sahara team has designed the system to be as simple to use as possible, abstracting away the complexity required to ensure every part of the AI stack is compatible, monetizable, and secure. Under the hood, countless innovations were developed by the Sahara team to make this possible.
8/ The team is led by the duo @xiangrenNLP, a USC tenured professor who was previously awarded MIT Technology Review Innovator 35 and 2023 Samsung Researcher of Year, and @tz_sahara, a UC Berkeley Alumni who was previously Investment Director at Binance Labs, and Investments at finance firms. The rest of the team bring in valuable expertise from Stanford, UC Berkeley, AI2, Toloka, Stability AI, Microsoft, Binance, Google, Chainlink, LinkedIn, Avalanche, and more.
9/ Generative AI is still very much in its infancy in tech and market size; the centralized chat and video tools of today are throttled by their limited reach because of the difficulty in integrating the entire AI stack into one product. Sahara AI is the only company solving this bottleneck through a modular design which uses blockchain as the backbone for permissionless access, token distributions, and security. The future of AI must be easily accessible and equitable in order for everyone to participate in it, and Sahara AI is the only company building towards this vision.
End/ For a more detailed technical breakdown, read the litepaper here saharalabs.ai/learn/litepaper#design.
Join the waitlist here hi.saharalabs.ai/get-started.
Contact Sahara to create and use a Sahara Business Agent here saharalabs.ai/solutions/use-cases/ai-for-business.