Alexis Trujillo.- As technology advances at a breakneck pace, AI has become a powerful agent capable of transforming various sectors of society. Its potential to give monetary means to users is particularly noteworthy with all considerations involved, and it's crucial to make this technology work to create a more equitable and just world.

This could be no simple task but that won’t stop the people behind Autonomys, a company that’s working in the next stages of AI as a model to empower people.

We spoke to Jim Counter, Autonomys' Head of Community, about AI3.0, how this company works and how people can get involved in this concept.

Jim comes from designing system architectures software development. Back in 2021 he joined the Autonomys Community as Ambassador and later, in 2023, he became part of the project building and nurturing the community of Autonauts, fostering collaboration and growth, and ensuring the ecosystem's success through strategic partnerships and community engagement.

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Arriving to AI3.0

What is Autonomys doing with AI?

Autonomys is the foundation layer for AI3.0, providing the infrastructure to scale decentralised AI3.0 applications on-chain - hyper-scalable permanent data storage, super fast data availability & flexible EVM-compatible decoupled execution.

We built the Autonomys Network from first principles to simultaneously achieve scalability, security and decentralisation. At its core, the Autonomys Network implements Subspace, a novel storage-based consensus protocol that separates consensus from execution. This proposer-builder separation allows the Autonomys Network to independently scale transaction throughput and storage requirements while maintaining a fully decentralised blockchain

What's the difference between this decentralized human-centric AI and ChatGPT, for instance?

Basically, AI has evolved through three major stages and AI3.0 represents a new era in AI development, where decentralisation, human autonomy and self-sovereignty are at the forefront. 

The first stage is the Centralised Machine Learning. During this period we saw the rise of deep learning, powered by platforms like TensorFlow, primarily hosted on Big Tech’s cloud infrastructure. Here, humans interacted passively with narrow, task-specific AI, mainly as consumers of services designed by others. You may call it the pre-transformer age.

The AI2.0, or the Centralised Generative AI phase, includes large language models like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, all of them providing more interactive experiences yet remaining centralised, controlled by major tech entities. While these models allow more user input, they limit user control over the model's behaviour, use of data and objectives.

Now, for AI3.0, or Decentralized, Human-Centric AI, comes an Age of Autonomy in which Autonomys is developing a radically different AI paradigm for this technology to be an open, decentralised and collaborative AI model ecosystem, accessible to everyone, aligning with the basic principles of Web3.

This approach fosters transparency, user agency and flexibility. Instead of simply interacting with AI, people can customise, train and even deploy their own AI agents -our Autonomys agents- to act autonomously on their behalf. 

In AI3.0 the boundary between AI creator and consumer blurs significantly, marking a new era in which users have true agency in their interactions with AI.

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How Humans fit into this Autonomy Era for AI? 

The Autonomys framework leverages three principles to design a post-AI-revolution world that prioritises human empowerment: safety, connection, and prosperity. Underpinning AI3.0 is a human-centric vision that focuses on fulfilling these fundamental needs. 

With decentralisation, personal data and agent interactions are safeguarded through secure blockchain technology. Users control how their data is used, offering a safer and more private experience compared to centralised systems.

Through decentralised agent collaboration, users connect not only with each other but also with autonomous agents working on their behalf. This interaction enables more meaningful engagement in various aspects of life, from work and leisure to online governance and commerce.

As AI’s capabilities evolve, so do economic structures. Autonomys advocates for a world where individuals gain economic agency through incentive-based participation in its decentralized ecosystem. Users contribute to and benefit from a permissionless, agent-driven economy that upholds the importance of human creativity and complex problem-solving.

In summary, AI3.0 facilitates the Age of Autonomy which is a rosier future than some see as the post-AI outcome for humanity. Rather than relying on a future defined by universal basic income and declining human relevance, AI3.0 encourages individuals to participate meaningfully in the ecosystem.

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How Autonomys’ model is different from ChatGPT?

Through Autonomys' decentralised AI platform, users can gain new skills, leverage AI tools for entrepreneurship, and directly contribute to network growth. This model creates a framework where human creativity, emotional intelligence, and entrepreneurial potential are not only preserved but amplified, opening doors to unprecedented innovation and value creation.

In contrast to AI2.0 models like ChatGPT, which centralise control and limit user agency, AI3.0 puts individuals at the helm of their AI interactions. Through Autonomys, users not only protect their data and control AI applications but also engage as creators and active participants in decentralized, human-centric AI ecosystem. This new era of autonomy promises a collaborative and trust-based experience, where humans and machines thrive together in a secure, open environment designed to elevate human potential.

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The AI´s Farming Future

Let's move onto another piece in the Autonomys' terminology which seems to be a project cornerstone, which I know it's coming from Subspace: Farming. How does it work in AI terms?

Farming is something I am very close to - it is how I got involved in the project in the first place.

Farming is the process of earning rewards by pledging SSD space for storage and consensus to our super-accessible, globally distributed web3 network. No expensive setup or stake required. Autonomys Network rewards are frequent and fair.

Essentially you run some software on your computer that harnesses idle storage and allows you to get rewarded for it.

Space Acres is our lightweight, easy-to-use application for farming and running nodes. Start farming on Space Acres in less than 5 minutes on almost any computer, with support for Windows, MacOS and Linux. There's a video guide that shows you how easy it really is to get going.

We believe that true decentralisation comes with participation and we are particularly proud of how we have kept the barriers to farming so low. You can run Space Acres on modest commodity hardware. 

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With Farmers playing this huge Role, who are the other players in the ecosystem and how do they interact?

There are different classes of network citizens on our protocol: Farmers, operators & timekeepers are node runners. 

Farmers, as we've mentioned, secure consensus and earn $AI3 by pledging disk space to the network.

Operators execute transactions on domains and earn transaction fees for their work.

Timekeepers run the Proof-of-Time chain and maintain the randomness beacon for the consensus chain.

Nominators are token holders. They nominate $AI3 towards operators and earn a share of the fees as staking rewards. This is a more passive way to participate as it does not require running any software.

They are all essential agents to make the network run. Together, they provide consensus, storage and computation to the Autonomys Network.

And, of course, partners are vital when building a full service ecosystem. We are building a full service ecosystem for AI3.0 and our partners reflect that. Vana, Masa, NeuroMesh, Protofire and SubQuery to mention a few, play a key role in our ecosystem expansion.

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The Space Race and other Milestones

Since you have a long time in the Project and are a key part in it,  what are the major milestones Autonomys has coming up? 

Well, we could not really be having this conversation at a more exciting time. We have our Mainnet Phase-1 launch comingnext week. I'll be hosting a launch party on Nov, 6th if anyone would like to join us.

The Space Race is a pivotal event marking the live launch of the Autonomys Network mainnet. It consists of three main phases:

1. Launchpad (scheduled November 6, 2024): The foundation launches the network and infrastructure. Data seeding begins, and farmers can join the network and plot but not produce blocks yet⁠.

2. Lift-off (scheduled November 13, 2024): Block authorship is enabled, and farmers can start plotting to contribute to the network's growth⁠.

3. Escape Velocity (date TBA): This phase begins when the community reaches the target pledged space. At this point, mainnet rewards are activated, and farmers start earning AI3 tokens⁠.

The Space Race is designed to establish secure, decentralised consensus across the network before rewards are activated. It's a collaborative effort where farmers play a crucial role by contributing storage and computational resources to help bootstrap the network during its critical initial period⁠.

We also have our Hacker Month 2 initiative which will be starting soon. It's a series of events to bootstrap Autonomys’ developer ecosystem that will include a hackathon, workshops, Q&A sessions, and more. If anyone would like to get involved you can participate as a developer by building something using the Auto SDK and win prizes.

And finally, we have Stake Wars 2 planned. It is an incentivised Staking contest for the Autonomys Network to test domains and staking functionality. It follows our very popular and successful Stake Wars 1 last year.

Further out, we will be launching our decoupled execution environments - domains in Q1 2025. This is a very big deal for us and you can read more on our phased approach to launch in our blog. 

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DAO Labs and Autonomys

How do you see the union between our companies?

Our partnership with DAO Labs has been a game-changer for Autonomys. The Autonomys HUB allows our community to become an active extension of our core team. Through carefully curated tasks, each Autonomys HUB member plays a critical role in our growth trajectory by amplifying our message across key social channels.

Since we soft-launched the Autonomys HUB a month ago, we’ve hit an all-time high for all social activity, and achieved 1/5 of our total of 2.8 million Impressions on X. In conjunction with our strong marketing strategy and other comms verticals, DAO Labs has been highly effective in creating a dedicated community focused on user-generated content. 585 Social Miners have generated ~9.5 million impressions, contributing ~42% of all social activity about Autonomys.

DAO Labs’ backend tools are great as they allow our content and engagement ambassadors to easily create tasks and review submissions. From a HUB Social Miner´s perspective, their incentivization framework of reputation and redeemable points, and methods of avoiding fraud and low-effort production, are particularly innovative.

In the future, we will be expanding our rewards structure and task diversity. Whether you’re a social media expert, content creator, developer, community connector, or just passionate about our project, we’re developing a wide range of tasks to match your skills and interests. Get ready for an expanded rewards program that recognises and compensates your contributions directly.

Something important to note is the support we’ve received from the DAO Labs team, which has been excellent - timely, thoughtful responses to all our questions have helped us get bootstrapped on the platform smoothly and quickly.

And, a word to our Social Mining Community: As ever, your enthusiasm and commitment are the driving force behind our success. Each post, each interaction, each moment of engagement brings us closer to our collective goals. We’re building a movement, and you are at the heart of it.

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Get into Social Mining today! These are our channels for you to follow and become part of our great community:

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🌐 Socials
Telegram  |  Discord  |  X Social  |  Official Blog  |  Reddit  |  Medium  |  YouTube

🌎 More useful Links

Website  |  DAOVERSE  |  Social Mining Basics

Autonomys´AI3.0, a model to empower people

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