Travis Good: Machine Intelligence as a new world currency: facing down OpenAI with Ambient, a hyperscaled decentralized PoW-powered alternative
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Hey, everyone. It's Tommy from Delphi Ventures. Welcome back to the show. Today, I'm extremely excited to host Travis from Evient yet again. It's Travis' third time on the show. Travis, how are you?
I am great, Tommy. Thank you. Just, out here in sunny San Francisco, doing the, crypto startup accelerator, with, a 16 z. So intense and a lot of a lot of fun.
Travis, I'm so glad that we could finally chat now that Ambient is out of stealth. We're happy to to have co led your your pre seed, and at the time, we couldn't talk about it. I need the one liner on Ambient. It is so good. Tell me what tell everyone what Ambient is.
Well, Ambient is a useful proof of work, l one, where the proof of work is verified inference, fine tuning, and pretraining on a single large language model that runs on every node, of its network. It is a fork of Solana that converts Solana, from proof of state to proof of work and operates at full Solana speeds.
It's insane. We're gonna get into all of this, but before let's let's walk backward. What is the end goal of Ambient? Are you building an are you building an l one to build an l one? Are you building an AI model to build an AI model? What's the end result?
Yeah. Well, I think this, this gets into the nature of, crypto and currencies. So, you know, if you look at, at Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin is a magnificent project, that achieved one of its goals really well and did not achieve another one of its goals. So Bitcoin's original goal, was to be a currency. You know? It's something that we wanted to be able to, pay for pizza for pay, you know, pay for pizza with and, transact with. And, you know, if we had achieved that goal, I think it would have reordered the world in a really healthy way. It would have decentralized, a lot of the power structure
Travis, that's it's awesome to hear. It is sad when you bring up that we denominate Bitcoin the way we do, after all these years. But focusing a bit on Ambien, what exactly does that mean? Right? Like, I hold your token. What you know, with Bitcoin, I have there's many different ways to splice it. The easiest is, you know, I have $82,500, this horrible night because Trump likes to be unhinged. But, what does it mean to hold Ambiance token? I have access to a model or a blockchain or inference. Like like, what do I have access to? That's
a great question. And I I wanna take a step back and, you know, talk about something that's been happening in the world of models, and I'm gonna relate it to your question. And what's been happening in the world of models is a convergence of capabilities. So we've seen closed source models and open weights models, start to achieve a very similar outcomes in most meaningful problem solving domains. And our thesis is that that standardization and convergence is going to continue, because the economic incentives to do that are simply too strong. Like, all these players need to try and balance eac
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