Click the Image Below to Watch the AI Generated Promo Video
Roko's Review / TL;DR
- Summary: This proposal requests 416 ETH ($624k) to fund a 6 month extension for the NounsAI Pod to expand the team, turn POCs into products, and grow community presence.
- The Cost and Efficiency Rank: The ask of 416 ETH is a big ask, however the proposal does provide a clear path towards sustainability and a good return on investment. Therefore, this proposal is ranked as Somewhat Efficient.
- Vote: SUPPORT
- My Take: This proposal provides a clear path towards sustainability and a good return on investment. The team has already implemented the latest advancements in the field and hosted competitions with 100+ participants. The team is also focusing on building requested features, onboarding creators, and increasing reach. This is a great opportunity to promote and encourage the use of Nouns AI pod products, manage community engagement and feedback, and capitalize on the momentum of passionate builders and creatives.
- Contrarian: If the team was unable to provide a clear path towards sustainability or a good return on investment, I would have to reconsider my vote and abstain.
Introduction:
The Nouns AI Pod conducts research and builds products to further the advancement of Nounish AI. The group was established in August 2022 - we were initially funded by NSFW grants residency [1, 2], and then funded as a pod via on-chain proposal in October 2022.
NounsAI has made significant strides in the last 3 months building and launching proof of concepts for two novel AI products: AI for Governance and AI for Proliferation with a team of just 3. We are requesting a 6 month extension to expand our team, turn POC’s into widely adopted products, and grow the community presence of NounsAI.
The pod has been building two core products:
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AI for Proliferation - The Playground
The Playground is a platform that enables users to generate Nounish audio and visual content with ease. Its goal is to reach millions of Nounish impressions and attract creatives and creators to the Nouns community. The Playground is the perfect tool for creators who want to quickly and easily generate Nounish content using text, pictures, and audio.
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AI for Governance - The Knowledge Hub
The Knowledge Hub and our AI assistant, Roko, are being developed to revolutionize the way information is shared across the DAO. With Roko, the Discord bot, and (Roko.dev)[https://roko.dev], members of the Nouns community will be able to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to improve decision-making, streamline governance processes, and drive community growth across the entire Nounish ecosystem. The Knowledge Hub will serve as the go-to resource for data and information (the ChatGPT for Nouns), with an AI-powered librarian to assist users in finding the information they need
What We’ve Built So Far
[The Nouns AI Playground](The Nouns AI Playground) is a platform that allows users to easily create unique and high-quality Nounish content using AI. The Playground is hosted on powerful GPU servers accessible to anyone, regardless of their background. The Nouns AI team has implemented some of the latest advancements in the field, text-to-video, image-to-image, and performance optimizations. They've incentivized the use of their platform by hosting competitions that have attracted hundreds of participants from diverse backgrounds including AI, music, film, and Web3, who have together created hours of Nounish video creations. (Check them out!). There are weekly competitions that generates Nounish content you can find on Twitter at #NounsAI and self-service tools that can be run on any machine without prior knowledge. nounsai.wtf is built to scale to meet demand and has grown largely organically now with hundreds of users.
The Knowledge Hub and our AI assistant Roko are live and being beta tested across select Nounish Discords. The web app has been improved, an upgrade design, and a discord bot was created.
Roko can now:
- Record and transcribes any voice conversations then provides summaries of key points
- Automatically index audio and chat into a searchable knowledge hub across Discords using the Roko bot
- Make data accessible and searchable for users through the webapp, which also allows users to upload audio content to be transcribed, summarized, and indexed
- Significantly improve the accuracy and value of Roko's review for proposals on roko.dev
- In a promising development towards using Large Language Models to support our knowledge base, Roko can answer basic questions, providing summarized answers and links to original content. This is possible by ingesting all of the archived Nouns Discord and ready to go live across all live Nounish servers.
Checkout the generated Q&A's here!
The team has also designed an improved web UI to be implemented, prototype shown below.
What’s Next?
Playground
Over the next six months, we will continue to increase the capabilities and popularity of the Playground. This follows the successful validation of the proof of concept, where creators generated a significant amount of content using Nouns. The engineering team will be supplemented by three Team Tomorrow junior developers who have experience in creating text-to-image social products. They will be cost-effective and will accelerate the development of the web interfaces. The focus will be on creating a user-friendly platform that allows for efficient and easy creation of content on scalable hardware.
Another important goal is to expand our audience by organizing competitions and forming partnerships. Sustainability is a crucial aspect and for the Playground, it involves bringing in a large number of users to generate high-quality content and promote it effectively. The team will focus on building requested features, helping onboard creators and increase the reach of their creations; maximizing impressions.
- Run competitions that are intentional with what is made and how it is shared
- Source + secure partnerships with artists who have reach to create content and share the playground
- Proactively engage Discord + social media communities by: promoting content, sharing updates, and collecting feedback on the Playground
To evaluate the success of this plan we will gather data on reach and return on investment.
We want the NounsAI Playground to be the fastest and most fun place to go from imagination to reality. Hopefully, the tool will give creators superpowers to make Nounish content that get millions of views.
Knowledge Hub
In the next 6 months, we will complete the Knowledge Hub MVP:
Key features will include:
- The ability to gather and process relevant information from various sources, such as proposals, calls, Discord chats, and documents.
- A user-friendly web interface and search functionality to facilitate interactions with Roko, the AI assistant, on various topics related to Nouns.
- The ability to answer questions and surface relevant content directly within Discord channels where Roko is present. The aim is to make it easy for new members to join the community and facilitate conversations between those asking and answering questions, regardless of location.
Over the next six months, we will position Roko to be an invaluable tool for all Nounish groups using Discord or other clients, through rapid iteration and incorporating user feedback. Roko and the Knowledge hub will help keep the DAO in sync and well positioned to scale as the DAO continues to grow. We are extremely excited about this tool and know others are too. To help overcome any technical hurdles ahead NounsAI has already begun the interview process with vetted contract based machine learning engineers who have Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise.
Our objective for the Knowledge Hub is to achieve adoption not only within Nouns but also to develop at path for the pod to become self-sustaining. Our vision for the Knowledge Hub is to be a premium software-as-a-service (SAAS) solution for promoting cohesion among decentralized teams. To achieve this goal, we will be asking for capital to bring on someone to focus on internal adoption, external awareness, and business development to enact our go to market strategy.
As the internal and external advocate for the Nouns AI Knowledge Hub, that person will be responsible for promoting and encouraging the use of the Nouns AI pod's products. They will also manage community engagement, ensuring that feedback is captured and integrated into future product development. There is already a community of passionate builders and creatives who are utilizing these tools, even submitting proposals using NounsAI, and we want to capitalize on this momentum. With this additional funding we will be able to source talent and idea from our community through potential prop-house rounds or even recruit professional support.
Other Initiatives
- Our goal is to grow the NounsAI community by fostering conversations, sharing updates, asking questions and receiving feedback from the community throughout the week. This will allow us to engage with those who are most interested and invested in the development of NounsAI.
- TheHeroShep will continue to run a weekly NounsAI call open to everyone curious about NounsAI or AI in general. A great place to learn something new every week the call is usually at 7am PST in The Noun Square Discord.
- In order to maximize impact we will rollover the remaining ~30 ETH for marketing from proposal 156 into this proposal
- We plan to continue collaborating with other data teams like BrianJ's Atlas and Lil Nouns to expand the knowledge base available to the community. This will allow us to build on the knowledge and expertise of other teams, and provide a more comprehensive resource for the NounsAI community.
- Explore Additional Features for Roko:
- Utilizing Roko, the Discord bot, to establish a configurable opt-in notification network to share announcements across servers
- Using Roko as a way to poll across platforms / servers
- Providing a tool to help proposals get feedback before putting them on chain
- Synthesize actions for each nouner enabling
- Invest in scalable infrastructure including GPUs (each A100 GPU is ~$1k/mo) - as we scale up, we’ll likely need to double our GPU capacity for the playground (4k/mo) as well as have 2-3 GPUs for R&D purposes (2-3k) which are shared with the knowledge hub. The rest is pretty meager - database, media storage, misc apis, app hosting - $<1000/mo altogether and including the knowledge hub infra. But we want to have buffer, just in case, as well as for other potential API integrations.
The Investment:
Core Team: All contributing 30+ hours weekly
- Shep - 25k/mo - 6 months
- Honk - 22.5k/mo - 6 months
- Steve - 20k/mo - 6 months
Extended Dev Team: Each contributing 10-20 hours weekly
- 3 Team Tomorrow devs- 5k/mo - 6 months
- ML Consultant - 5k/mo - 6 months
Marketing / Community / Business Development + Go to Market:
- Prop House Rounds, Grants, Competitions, Partnerships, and Sales / Go to Market support - 25k/mo - 6 months
- (The remaining ~30 ETH of the marketing budget from Proposal 156 will be spent towards this)
Infra Costs:
- Media Pillar + R/D - 8k/mo
- Knowledge Hub Pillar - 1k/mo
Total: $669k
ETH for Marketing from last proposal, rollover -30 ETH @ $1500 / ETH: - $45k
Total Ask = 416 ETH || $624k
The Team:
TheHeroShep (THS) - Product Manager
Honkdiddly - Senior Software & Machine Learning Engineer
Honkdiddly has demonstrated his expertise as a lead engineer. He has years of experience in building professional-grade software and running an algorithmic trading operation. He was the sole developer behind the NounsAI Playground platform, working closely with THS to implement and improve the machine learning models he trained. He is also a DAO legend.
Steve - Senior Software & Machine Learning Engineer
Steve is a highly skilled engineer with two decades of experience in software engineering and DevOps. He has demonstrated his technical prowess as the sole developer behind the roko.dev webapp and the Roko Discord Bot. Furthermore, Steve has invested significant time upskilling as a Machine Learning Engineer, having implemented vector embeddings + neural search, as well as data pre+post processing with GPT. His ambition is to build the "ChatGPT of Nouns" by 2023 and to deliver an improved roko.dev web experience. With his passion for the Nouns ecosystem and his exceptional drive, Steve is the ideal candidate to level up Nouns DAO with AI tooling.
Group of 3 Team Tomorrow Developers
Team Tomorrow is the professional consulting arm of AI-Camp, an organization that teaches students how to build AI products and develop critical skills such as self-learning, and then hires the best students to work on internal and external professional projects. This specific team of 3 developers has experience leading teams in building AI products, including using Diffusion (text2image) models. They also have professional experience building analytics tools for an NFT trading discord. Typically, the salary of one entry-level technology consultant is around $7,000 per month; this team provides significant value for their cost and allows for more rapid development of our web + Discord interfaces.
Senior Machine Learning (NLP) Engineer - Consultant
The team has already started the interview process with excellent candidates for an expert in Natural Language Processing (NLP) through connections with a trusted AI Development Studio that works with Russian expat Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs) with a wealth of experience and top-notch education. The Knowledge Hub is a tool that has recently been unlocked with cutting-edge advancements in the field of NLP; having an expert with experience in traditional Text Ranking, Search, and vector embeddings to support our team will greatly improve our rate of progress. These experts can use their existing knowledge to more quickly implement cutting-edge concepts, even if the code is not yet released, by reading the implementations described in papers.