Problem & Impact
AI is everywhere, including in the onchain economy. Outcompeting the traditional world relies upon our ability to use LLMs in ways that are faster and better than the incumbents.
We thus propose a domain dedicated to projects launched on Ethereum that have plans for integrating AI into their workflow.
This will provide 3 benefits
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Give a sense for how projects in the ecosystem are planning to use AI
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Let us provide appropriate support for guiding upon its actual integration and deployment by teams
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Accelerate AI usage on ethereum
Now that several foundational models have crossed the viability chasm for being good enough, we need to focus on their integration into existing products and services. If the decentralized world can better leverage the capabilities of LLMs as they exist today, we can make use of this short window of time to overthrow existing incumbents in the traditional world
Sensemaking Analysis
Pond recently ran a funding round where 76 high quality AI projects participated, with judges giving scores to each of them. We propose using their infra to accept applications from the ecosystem and a judging pool of experts to select winners from among them.
We anticipate this round as being especially useful for sourcing projects rather than funding. Almost every project in the ecosystem has a strategy for using AI in its operations or product. Being able to bring these ideas into one arena along with identification of the high potential teams in the ecosystem working on AI lets us provide more dedicated (financial and non-financial) support to make them a success.
Gitcoin’s Unique Role & Fundraising
We need to test better methods for integrating AI into capital allocation. For this domain, we are keen to keep a mandatory requirement that every applicant create an AI chatbot that has been fed sufficient context so that judges can simply talk to the AI for making decisions instead of having to read application forms (judges may optionally choose to see the context fed to the AI rather than solely use the conversational interface).
We will also require applicants to feed their AI with the latest context so that at any time evaluators can simply query the chatbot to measure and gauge progress on the milestones upon which more funding can be streamed.
This requirement has the nice feature of only letting teams with decent AI chops even being able to apply, while moving us beyond grant application forms into a conversational interface that can be auto updated by teams as they make progress towards their goals.
Success Measurement & Reflection
Positive outcomes comprise actual launch and integration of AI capabilities in applicant projects. We also see follow-on funding from investors and mentorship on LLM use by experts as an important component
Success is also measured in having a successful chatbot that can represent teams over time, marking an important step in moving beyond static grant applications for judges and evaluators.
Domain information
This domain is only open to teams that clearly list out their plans for integrating AI into their product or operations. They will also be required to submit a URL with an LLM that has information on their application, so that judges can learn about the team via a conversational interface instead of a static form.
We expect the LLM to be updated with context over the 6 month period so that evaluators can also interact with it to get updates on the project’s progress, based on which amounts are streamed to the teams over time upon milestone completion.
Devansh Mehta, Bill Shi and Davide Crapis will serve as domain experts, with additional judges being pulled in after a consensus of these 3 domain experts.