Arweave AO: May become the number one player in the AI era

ZAN

24-03-11 11:08

Read this article in 15 Minutes

AI summary

View the summary

Original title: "Arweave AO: The number one player in the AI era"

Original source: ZAN Team

At the beginning of February 2024, OpenAI released its first large-scale video model, Sora, opening a new chapter in the development of artificial intelligence. On February 13, Sam, the founder of the famous blockchain storage project Arweave, announced on Twitter that Arweave officially launched the super-parallel computer AO, which supports the introduction of large AI models into the blockchain's smart contracts. As soon as the information came out, it quickly aroused heated discussions among people related to AI and blockchain.

Basic Introduction

What is Arweave

Arweave is a new type of blockchain storage network designed to solve the problem of permanent data storage and access. Arweave is characterized by using a method called "permanent storage" to ensure that information is never lost by storing data on the blockchain. Arweave's cryptoeconomic model is designed to incentivize users to store and transmit data and ensure the security and reliability of the network, which allows users to safely store important data such as documents, pictures, videos, etc., and access this data at any time without worrying about the loss of data.

In particular, Arweave has shown its unique advantages in the field of NFT. NFT usually requires data to be saved off-chain, and if the data is lost or changed, the NFT will lose its meaning. Arweave provides a solution that allows NFT-related data to be permanently stored, thereby ensuring the long-term value and significance of NFTs. Platforms such as Opensea and Mintbase have already entered into strategic cooperation with Arweave, and Metaplex, an NFT project on the Solana chain, also uses Arweave as the default tool for metadata storage.

Arweave is also committed to projects that permanently preserve human knowledge and history, and is known as the "eternal Library of Alexandria on the blockchain."

What is AO

AO is a distributed, decentralized, Actor-oriented computing system based on Arweave.

Actor is a basic unit of concurrent computing model in computer science. Actor-oriented refers to the method based on the Actor model. In this method, each Actor can modify its assigned private state, but if you want to modify the state of other Actors, you can only modify it indirectly by sending messages. It is suitable for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems, which is why the project is named AO.

AO consists of three units:

· Messenger Unit: responsible for message communication, passing messages to computing units and coordinating to calculate output results;

· Scheduler Unit: responsible for scheduling and message sorting, and uploading messages to Arweave;

· Compute Unit: responsible for processing calculations and uploading calculation results to Arweave.

AO Through the orchestration of blockchain, each unit can be used as a horizontally scalable subnet to execute a large number of transactions at the same time, thereby achieving high-performance computing and theoretically providing nearly unlimited computing performance.

The core goal of AO is to achieve trustless and collaborative computing services without any practical scale restrictions. This provides a new paradigm for applications to combine blockchains. Compared with other high-performance blockchains such as Solana, Aptos, and Sui, AO can support the storage of large amounts of data, such as AI models; at the same time, compared to Ethereum, which can only use a single shared memory space, AO also allows any number of parallel processes to operate in the computing unit at the same time, and collaborate with other units through open messaging, without relying on centralized memory space.

What is AOS

AOS is a decentralized operating system built by Arweave based on AO. Its functions are similar to smart contracts, but the contract development language is Lua.

Lua is a concise, lightweight, and extensible scripting language, which is very different from our common smart contract languages Solidity, Rust, and Move.

AOS allows developers to start a command line process and start issuing commands, providing developers with a development experience similar to creating a new server instance on Alibaba Cloud and connecting to it via SSH, except that this command line process has the properties of a smart contract, which means that these commands can not only achieve seamless user interaction across networks, but also have decentralized and trustless computing as key advantages.

Advantages of AO

The essence of AO is a decentralized cloud service based on SCP (Storage-based Consensus Paradigm). There are three progressive relationships, namely "cloud service", "decentralized cloud service" and "decentralized cloud service based on SCP".

Cloud services are believed to be familiar to everyone, and their importance need not be repeated. They have become an important infrastructure in the era of big data, but they are almost all built and controlled by centralized giants, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure abroad, and Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud in China.

Decentralized cloud services refer to the use of blockchain economic incentives to achieve the sharing and exchange of cloud resources in a decentralized network. Users can obtain digital currency or tokens by providing their processing power, storage space or bandwidth to the network. They can then use these digital currencies or tokens to access services.

Decentralized cloud services rely on market forces to determine the value and allocation of computer power, storage space, and bandwidth. It achieves more efficient and direct resource allocation. This economic structure encourages users to participate in the network and fair competition, which not only strengthens the cloud infrastructure, but also breaks the control of giants, because all the underlying processing power, storage space, and bandwidth are provided by users. Once the economic structure of a decentralized cloud service network is no longer applicable, users can choose to exit the network or join other decentralized cloud service networks, which limits the space for service providers of decentralized cloud service networks to "do evil."

Well-known projects in the decentralized cloud service track include Dfinity, Ankr, Akash, etc. Here, it can be added that Arweave itself can also be classified as a decentralized cloud service track, but it only provides a single cloud storage service.

One of the challenges of decentralized cloud services is that consensus mechanisms can be complex and difficult to implement because they require nodes in the network to reach a consensus on data storage and retrieval. SCP is one of the effective ways to solve this challenge. SCP is a consensus paradigm based on storage. Its core idea is that as long as the storage is immutable, the transactions above are traceable, so no matter where the application is calculated, the same result will be obtained.

AO uploads all the states before and after the calculation, as well as the input and output, to Arweave. Any third party can download all the data, run the execution environment (such as a virtual machine) and execute the input in sequence to obtain the final consistent result. In this way, permissionless verifiability is achieved and a trustless consensus is achieved.

This means that AO can achieve distributed verifiable computing, which is also the biggest advantage of AO compared to other decentralized cloud services.

Summary: The significance of AO to AI

The evolution of AI requires the joint promotion of three key elements: algorithms, computing power, and data. For some emerging AI companies, in order to reduce costs and obtain more computing power, they have no choice but to cooperate with cloud service giants. After all, not all companies have the ability to build their own computing power, and developing AI applications will also increase the demand for cloud services. At the same time, cloud service giants will also develop their own AI systems. Now we can see that almost all centralized cloud service providers have developed their own generative large models.

In this cooperative and competitive relationship, cloud service giants put AI emerging companies in an extremely disadvantaged position through their monopoly on computing power and dominant position in cloud services. This competitive relationship, which does not compete on innovation but on financial strength, ultimately harms the interests of users.

Decentralized cloud services can balance this unfair competitive relationship and attract users to participate in the network to contribute computing power and data. I believe that they will become new players in the AI era in the future.

Arweave launched AO to cut into the broader decentralized cloud service track from the vertical decentralized storage track. Its permanent on-chain storage is no longer just a separate storage of user data, but a permanent host for cloud computing. It focuses on large-scale verifiable computing with unlimited expansion, which has infinitely improved its imagination space and aims to become the number one player in the AI era.