hey, you’ve got good stuff going on here.
just checked your web and saw travel deals powered by AI
Can you elaborate on that - why the travel focus?
Thanks.
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Centralization vs. Decentralization in AI: Navigating the Trade-offs
Reply to a question from @meow about the concerns of AI being famously centralized. Our response:
Yes, AI is very centralized right now! As we’ve been building this project the question keeps coming up, where is the line between the inputs to the AI (the data we crawl), the augmentation (vector DBs), the training and the actual operation of the AI (e.g. GPUs, llama.cpp, ONNX, etc)?
We’re addressing this progressively and trying to walk a practical line. We are sure that there are some projects out there that aspire to perform purely distributed AI training. We think this is a laudable goal, but probably not practical now. AI technologies are evolving very, very quickly, and fully distributed software is very hard to get right. There’s an impedance mismatch between the AI training and fully distributed processing right now. We fully expect that this space will eventually get there, but expect that’s likely years in the future; an eternity in the Web3 space. Furthermore, when it comes to foundational models, there are a lot of things being done in the open, if not yet in the Web3 space. Open source models that have “learned to speak” are very, very good. There is not necessarily a lot of value in teaching a model completely from scratch; we don’t just mean this in the Web3 sense, almost no AI company really makes sense to train models completely from scratch these days.
On the other hand, the inputs are one of the most difficult parts to acquire right now, and we can confidently produce this right now. With these inputs we can produce specializations and augmentations which effectively teach the models new things via specialization (e.g. LORAs, etc) as well as augmentation (RAGs, etc). Right now we run these parts in centralized infrastructure but we are super motivated to run them on the end users’ devices. The world has already produced truly spectacular tools which allow running advanced models on modest devices (llama.cpp, ONNX, etc).
As a team we want to focus on delivering. Right now the benefits of running the generation phase of the model locally is less than running the augmentation phase locally (allowing the “customer artifacts” to live locally with the customer). This keeps the customer specific parts away from the general purpose parts.
The next step (not immediately on the roadmap, but clearly in our future), is to do the generation locally. If for no other reason than it will save us a lot of money not having to sit there grinding out text responses on our infrastructure, as well as the obvious user benefits for both speed and privacy. Yet, in the decision between keeping momentum up and delivering vs the complexity of making these generations run reliably on thousands of different device configurations, delivering great products and gaining users wins right now.
Finally, more complex training is probably out of scope for the foreseeable future. We are certainly following this space closely and if it becomes more practical, or becomes more necessary for some reason, then we would certainly elevate it, but for now we see fully distributed training as the sort of trap that can mire a project in incredible technical complexity for an unclear and likely unnecessary outcome.
So, when it comes to the laudable goal of fully decentralized AI, we’re focusing on delivering real and achievable gains in the near term, while always keeping ourselves open to decentralizing additional parts as it becomes practical.
The aggregation and abstraction of depin make it so much easier for the average user (not the average crypto expert, but the average user) to simply tap install and have a gateway to these ecosystems on their device, living in their pocket 24/7. And in the process, we onboard new users to own a wallet and experience the empowering benefits of web3. I assume the advantages here are clear, but happy to address further if you like.
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Good day, please how can we stake our coins?
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We’re going to upload those today, thanks for your interest!
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Hi there, can you elaborate on what you mean by “make real use of the mess in your wallet”?
On the other point about wanting to understand a token use case before getting involved is exactly right. That’s what we’re hoping our post here explains about our token and project. So if you have any specific questions or comments, we’re here to help!
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Thanks for the question and compliment!
Although, we have big plans for our AI agent to discover a range of highly personalized deals to create the world’s best rewards program that our customers want most, we’re highlighting travel deals for several key reasons:
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It’s a fantastic use case for a personal AI agent that can save you time and money. The average person spends 5+ hours planning a trip weeks in advance. You’re juggling 50+ open tabs just to make a decision. With AI, we can eliminate all those tabs down to 1, saving you hours. Plus AI never sleeps, so it can constantly look for deals months in advance on your behalf. The travel industry is ripe for disruption. Most people don’t realize that this industry runs on software built in 60s
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Associating our brand with travel, entertainment, airtime minutes is not only great for content marketing, but a fantastic consumer use case for our depin network. For example, if you’re going to travel to a conference in a different country, you’re scouring the web for data for all aspects of the trip. Instagram for photo inspiration. Restaurant reviews, Seat map reviews, blog posts, price changes, hotel reviews, transportation, location maps, real time comments on Twitter, videos on Youtube. A DePin network is fantastic at gathering all the data you need and using AI to make sense of it, understanding context and sentiment, so you get rich, real-time relevant travel insights and deals.
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Great to hear you’re interested! Staking UPT is on the roadmap. We will share more details soon. If you’d like to know as soon as possible, simplest way is to sign up for notifications on https://x.com/uprockcom.
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I posted but didn’t correctly reply back. Here’s the post: Introducing UpRock! DePin for AI - Share your idle internet and earn $UPT - #17 by UpRock
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Not sure if my reply was linked to your question, but here’s the post: Introducing UpRock! DePin for AI - Share your idle internet and earn $UPT - #8 by UpRock
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Can you download this app on your phone ? I have an iPhone
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Very soon! We’re about to launch beta version of the iOS app in a week or so. I’ll update here when it’s live. Appreciate your interest!
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May be I misunderstood the project and I don’t know what is possible. I was thinking more about some of the airdrops I get in my wallet that I am too scared to touch because I don’t know what they are (so they keep piling up). Wouldn’t it be nice to have some sort of an AI assistant to help people figure out which ones are useful and which ones are scams?
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OH gotcha! Yeah, this is totally something an AI wallet assistant should be able to understand and explain what’s going on. We’ve onboarded many friends to crypto and they asked us the same thing. “I keep getting random tokens, why?” The AI should explain that this is a common marketing practice for companies to airdrop tokens to get your attention, but that it is also abused by scammers. The AI should then give some practical tips on what to do about it. Knowing which tokens are a scam is tougher, but not impossible for an AI to help with over time. Great suggestion.
In meantime, check out Bonk’s https://www.pooperscooper.app! It helps cleanup your wallet. 
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Hi thanks for the question! We adopt a balanced approach between centralization and decentralization to simplify the onboarding process and allow users to start earning tokens immediately. When you create an account with us, we automatically generate a wallet for you. However, these wallets act as intermediaries.
Essentially, our Solana wallets serve as conduits. Although they appear to be linked to your account for easy fund transfers, they don’t actually hold your funds. Instead, any funds sent to your UpRock address are immediately transferred to a secure multi-sig treasury wallet. This setup enables you to transfer funds between a third-party wallet you own and your UpRock address seamlessly. After we transition to a fully on-chain system, you’ll have the option to authenticate your wallet’s ownership with UpRock for withdrawals or deposit directly into your UpRock wallet, which is then instantaneously moved to the treasury for security, similar to how most centralized exchanges operate to safeguard assets, often keeping a significant portion off-chain.
After our platform fully launches, we’ll encourage and teach users how to either create or import their personal wallets for enhanced security, while still maintaining the ability to interact with UpRock services. Your earnings begin in the UpRock app, and when you decide to withdraw, they are routed from your UpRock wallet to your personal wallet. We’re also planning to create a visual guide to make this process clearer for everyone.
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This is awesome! Will there be a bandwidth marketplace in the future where people can define datasets they need, price, and then the uprock network delivers?
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One of my referrals didnt get counted. What can i do?
How did you handle the legal situation?
As I understand that UpRock has decentralized mobile compute power and internet bandwidth technology. In what other areas can this technology be utilized? What types of B2B use cases can be developed?
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Hi what do you mean? Any specific concerns?
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