Chris Dawe on Effect AI’s decentralized networks for artificial intelligence

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network today on blockchain interviews we have chris dawe the founder and ceo of effect ai chris welcome to the show and thanks for being here ashton mann thank you very much for for having me on the show i'm very excited to join you today i'm very excited as well and this is

0:20such an interesting topic uh ai i if we could just kick off the interview by explaining what is affect ai how have you combined automation blockchain cryptocurrency and all these other amazing things that you're working on and then we'll dive right in yeah cool man that's a fantastic question and incredibly relevant to our our project um obviously these are some

0:42pretty significant buzzwords in technology but um with buzzwords and technology there's always room for marriages in these technologies and how we use cryptocurrencies and blockchain to kind of marry the artificial intelligence world is obviously there's two branches of artificial intelligence one is um a computer vision so this is teaching computers how to

1:05to see like a human and then you have natural language processing which is more about teaching a computer how to understand languages the blockchain creates this uh open and inclusive environment to connect to basically anybody in the world so if we build a platform where language data can be structured and can be worked on by anybody in the world um that's a pretty powerful thing and

1:29that's how we use blockchain in cryptocurrencies so we tap into people to help structure language data and computer vision data labeling these images in different languages for clients all over the world and we pay them in cryptocurrency so it doesn't matter about the banking system it doesn't matter about any geopolitical problems if you have a wi-fi connection

1:49it doesn't matter what the skin color is your religion or where you're from if you have something to add to our data sets that our customers need then you can jump on board and you can earn um you can earn value you can earn crypto currencies in real time so instead of waiting for the banking system to get you your funds across seas um or or you know these these different

2:10legacy uh ways of the financial systems we we pay our workforce uh in real time so that's how we connect the blockchain in our platform our ai data structuring platform so yeah pretty it's vital for what we do and there's no company in the world right now that has access to more talent than we do because of the blockchain yeah it's very cool chris and i want to

2:31dive into the ai part but i also i just want to start with a little bit more on the blockchain because as you said you can have that instant uh settlement you can have people that are actually rewarded for the contributions that they make and you can prove that they've made them but there's also this decentralized network part where you can get more people connected and

2:50you don't really have to have that hierarchy layers to go through it's easier to tap into that information so if you could just elaborate a little bit more on how does the decentralized network work and as well the blockchain technology i was researching that you've been using the eos blockchain platform if you could explain maybe the rationale behind

3:09that and how it really benefits the ai platform we could dive into that yeah certainly so we'll start with the the latter question with the eos blockchain um our project and our company is completely blockchain agnostic we don't give a damn about each and every single ecosystem and uh the only thing that matters to us is a technology that works for what we're actually doing that that's

3:33what uh means the most now don't get me wrong i'm i'm the biggest fan of this space and personally aside from the company i'm a huge ethereum head i love decentraland i love engaging in that whole ecosystem but we started our project on uh the neo blockchain the chinese ethereum um and we migrated over to eos because neo is completely broken doesn't work

3:54and uh probably ever will whatever um but eos the blockchain behind eos has free transactions fast transactions and that's what we need we're doing hundreds of thousands of data annotations uh per day in some cases and to think about like the gas fees i mean five gas fees is too expensive for for our network to be running you know um so we can do hundreds of thousands of

4:19uh transactions on eos it's fast it's scalable it works perfectly for us um so that's why and how we use the eos blockchain but of course we're open to all kinds of suggestions technology first for our clients for our workforce and for our project um and the decentralized part obviously decentralized systems you you take uh the bitcoin protocol as an example of

4:43just a beautiful beautiful decentralized system that works from the beginning to the end it's just the most beautiful thing and to emulate that to add key elements like data structuring a platform where people work a distributed workforce of people um it becomes very complex so to create and like build forward to decentralized systems we're taking it in baby steps and all

5:06projects should do the same if you want to hard code and code is law uh decentralized systems uh that's a good way to break things and and uh um so what we believe in just these little steps we have a distributed decentralized community of people that work on our platform and coming up at the end of this month we will have a fully functioning dow so

5:25a decentralized autonomous organization which is one of the most fun components ever and what is where projects should be leading their project if they don't have that already where contributors community members can join your initiative with your pools of tokens that you have there to write proposals and building these things so that's our next big step to

5:44decentralization uh it's the most fun step we have ever taken we've gotten a lot of traction on that uh on that initiative that that we're launching at the end of this month and it's been a long process to put all of these technical aspects into a dow is incredibly uh difficult but also a lot of fun and we're flexible with it with the dow we're also releasing this

6:06in stages of decentralization and voting will come into play and all kinds of different participation from our community and and people abroad so um yeah baby steps to get there and uh we won't sacrifice quality and we will not jeopardize the project in the face of decentralization but the ultimate vision the ultimate goal is a fully decentralized uh network for

6:31artificial intelligence i love it chris that's amazing because and i think that you went about it the right way and i did a similar uh thing with my project where we were using ethereum and it was lacking that scalability and the co-founders were saying you really have to be business maximalist you can't be blockchain maximalist and you pigeonhole yourself into a

6:51technology that may be obsolete uh in you know a short amount of time and who really knows and to be able to pivot so to move from neo to eos and to also have that foresight that hey there could be other blockchains that are more interoperable and work better for the business aspect of it in the future and if that's what it takes to keep the business going

7:14uh and and to work better then it's the right decision to make um so it's interesting that i'm glad to hear that eos is working well for the project and that you're willing to switch technologies to whatever works best to solve the problem so i really like that and and the dow sounds really interesting as well i'm excited to see that being rolled out

7:34and i've been following the industry since the dao happened back in ethereum and let's hope that there's no little mishaps like that that happen but i'm really interested to hear how that plays out and the fact that anybody in the community can really just go in and start contributing i just want to dive into that a little bit there's all these different types of

7:56data and are there any requirements for people that come into that want to join this decentralized network input types of data or help build out the network and is there anything specific that you're looking for first or are there any requirements for that so it's such an incredibly wonderful space and uh moving forward like you said with pivoting and changing and adapting to

8:19the space we're adapting to the artificial intelligence place the crypto space the blockchain space the whole technology space where the internet is going uh where politics is going um and and so when it comes to the dow i've i've now participated in several dows and i'm working in all kinds of different places and learning how the voting works and how that's connected to

8:38the blockchain and how you make a proposal people will stake some some reputation on on your proposals which can pay that out um so with the dow we're really and if anybody wants to learn about what we're doing with the dow we've had blog posts over the last few months that my my team and myself have been writing just to let you know the different stages that

8:59are coming up but um so this opens up all the possibilities we're a fairly small team we got about seven people um and we have a backlog of about 7 000 things that we want to build into this network so this creates a perfect opportunity for people that are following our our project or dow uh contributors because i've learned that people that add value

9:20to a dow don't just add it to one dow they add it to all kinds of doubts so as we open this up we've attracted so many developers so many creative minds to come in and say we're ready we want to do pre-proposals to to offer our services in marketing sales business development uh programming uh you know design everything it's blowing my mind how fast

9:41this is taking off but when it comes to the workforce on our platform it's a very good question because we've had workers from the beginning and uh that that's a about three years ago when we launched the platform effect force and uh we started off with about 4 000 members and these were mostly crypto people people that participated in our token sale that were in our ecosystem in

10:03our community but as we drove further ahead we built this protocol where we can build services in different kind of automation pipelines with humans and algorithms in kind of working in tandem you're kind of on a conveyor belt you know humans are validating work algorithms are working to structure some stuff humans are revalidating and it goes along so

10:23um we've built a new platform called effect translate and effect translate is working specifically with language tasks we really feature about 12 different languages and um you can you can probably imagine that when we reach out to find uh like professional translators these aren't your typical crypto people they're absolutely the farthest away that you can think of you're

10:47looking at middle-aged people sometimes older people um that that have taken on these tasks on the computer to translate and we on board them teach them about our platform teach them about crypto currencies very quickly but we have a very easy onboarding um task and when you come on to the platform so the question was like how do you vet who these people are and

11:07qualify that they're worthy of doing the tasks that they say they are we have a crazy validation system where people have to do some qualifying tasks they have to stake a little bit of crypto to make sure that they're doing the correct work and not spamming the network um so there's a lot of qualifiers there's a lot of algorithms watching the work that's

11:24being done a lot of scripts that are checking and then we have human validators that are validating the work so subsets of everybody's work is being done by a special workforce of validators going yeah they're doing the work correctly they can give these workers feedback if they don't feel that they're doing them correctly and we call them master workers um

11:42so yeah there's a big validation system there and a qualification system in a gamified platform where people can start to level up and and really understand the value of creating good quality work on our platform for our clients yeah it'll be really interesting to see how that progresses as the network becomes more decentralized and and you talked about staking the

12:03tokens and you mentioned that you've had some of these community members for already three years from when the token sale was and i don't want to pass up the opportunity to talk about the effect efx token if you could elaborate because i know there's all these other governance functions and when you have a dow you really need that those tokens to act as governance

12:23contribution and all these different things can you just sort of lay out a a little look of what does it look like in how the token works within the ecosystem and how people need to use it but also how they can be rewarded in it yeah absolutely so obviously you you think about a token attached to a project and there's not too much justification for a lot of

12:46them and i'll be honest when we started it was hard to explain other than we needed to raise funds for this so we're giving that token in exchange but the efx token is truly a utility token to use the platform as a requester like craft times we work with kraft heinz the united nations the government of singapore we got all the big hitters paying tens of thousands if not hundreds

13:08of thousands of dollars to us to structure their data um that efx is the lifeblood of the entire network they cannot get one data annotation at all with any other method other than putting in the efx token into the system and that's the system that pays the workers for what they do obviously it's a volatile token like all cryptocurrencies but our workforce understands that they can

13:31convert that quickly to a stable coin to protect their earnings because a lot of the workers on our workforce they're not uh crypto people they're not uh first world people uh a massive majority of them are in developing countries so they're not in it for the cryptocurrency gains although they see them and they're educating themselves on the potential of

13:50investments in this space but their primary goal is to buy you know milk cheese eggs bread at the end of the day so uh we create these systems for them to be able to do that but uh that's the like the lifeblood of the whole network um and then obviously you can take that token and you can stake it what we did is we separated the utility token from the governance token so we

14:11had people stake the token to uh produce governance tokens we've recently stopped the production of those tokens uh we have actually over 61 of our entire supply circulating supply staked so that's just a an element of the commitment of the community that's behind this the secret project called effect.ai will be worldly known uh soon enough um but yeah that governance token is now

14:38what we call kind of the brains we have the beating heart and the blood uh with the efx that's what you need to make this system work the velocity of this token going back and forth from clients to the workforce to structure the data and then now we have this this nfx uh this this governance token which is really the brains behind where this whole network goes and is driven by votes in

15:01the community that's building these things out which will create more value for both the more that's being used in the system by requesters by actual clients paying cash to buy these tokens in the system uh the the more you know the more scarcity that there is there and the more usability and the more speculators will come into the to the the category as well

15:22but then we have that governance token and the governance token in the dow allows people to gain access to the um success of the network 10 of everything that goes through our platform goes back into the dow to the people that have staked efx and nfx to be a dow member a guardian as we call it um so that's where there and it's unlimited upside if we do

15:4310 million in revenue next year which isn't is not impossible uh 10 of all that stuff goes to the dow members and and they know the value of that and we've even had a smart contract stack in our staking protocol which creates stake age so the longer you stake the the more exponential growth and the weight of your efx so it's not actually just about how much efx you have

16:06but the time that you've actually staked it um so yeah it's an interesting thing for all the technology fans out there and the smart contract builders to check out what we've actually produced there yeah that's super interesting and it sounds like you've you've found the perfect utility to help grow the network in a you know community-based way and you know we're running out of time

16:26chris but i do want to talk about lastly the future how you're continuing to grow i'm guessing you're always looking for new community members and clients to help join the network are you looking for anything specific how can people learn more and get involved and start contributing and getting rewarded as well yeah listen we're always looking for great workers to join the platform in

16:47the various ways that we work at the end of the year we have something very very special we're getting into a new space in the crypto space um but i'm not going to elaborate on that but the protocol that we've built allows anybody to build a product or a surface service on our network so tapping into the human intelligence and the algorithms that are in our network so

17:06just an interface right so you can call it whatever you want abc data structuring for this specific niche thing um people don't get that yet and that's totally fine so what we've decided to do is build products and services on top of the effect network and one of our latest ones is called effect translate like i mentioned before where we do um we do translations for all kinds of

17:28different clients and and people across the globe but now we're focusing in on our famous favorite industry and that's the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry so if you are a crypto project that wants to translate your stuff and the value of translating your stuff is incredible the data shows that translating your stuff creates multilingual search engine optimization

17:52to get you seen in all of these different demographics so the chinese market is huge we have crypto projects we work with that when they translate their materials their blog posts their websites and stuff in chinese exponential growth across the board you're looking at the spanish markets which is an emerging crypto market portuguese market you're looking at the

18:12russian market we have workers doing all this stuff and we have an easy pipeline for you to just drop your files into our network we will deliver the perfectly translated um results to you and we also format it with our micro tasking community as well so any kind of format that you have we can do it subtitles on your videos on your youtube videos we

18:33can also do it so translating this stuff is uh creating a a lot of value to our projects uh and our our clients but um yeah we're getting really into the crypto space on that we work with like linus tech tips we we we do all his subtitles on youtube his community has grown from 9 million to 13 million in just the last few months because of translations on youtube so now we want

18:57to offer that to our favorite space so if you're a crypto project a blockchain project um that that's thinking about translations contact us we're your guys amazing well thank you so much chris i will leave the links to the effect ai platform in the description box below for all those community members that are looking to get involved all the best moving forward with the

19:17project and let's follow up in the near future ashton thanks so much for having me man it's been a pleasure thank you