Deep Funding has $1,000,000 of funding in AGIX tokens available in round one, for AI developers having a robust proposal of developing a decentralized, beneficial, and benevolent Artificial General Intelligence.
AI Developers Have to Deal With Two Roadblock Challenges:
- First, limited access to funds for translating their AI idea into reality.
- Second, no support from a dedicated community.
SingularityNET aims to help AI developers to conquer these challenges by means of the Deep Funding program.
Before we begin the “Ask Me Anything” session, my name is Jan Horlings, and I’m the Vice President of Product of SingularityNET. I’m here to answer even the minutest query of yours.
Watch the AMA recording here:
Q.1 What is Deep Funding?
Deep Funding by SingularityNET is a community-driven program designed to provide funding to AI developers and firms and, in turn, grow the decentralized AI platform.
You’re welcome to Deep Funding Round One!
Q.2 Why Deep Funding?
Last year, we voted and approved the Phase Two proposal, which would allow 1 Billion AGIX tokens minting over a 91-year-old period. 30% of the newly minted tokens are used for Deep Funding. The Deep Funding program will, in turn, fund AI projects that will seed our decentralized AI platform — benefitting :
- AI developers who are rewarded for creating awesome services and making good returns,
- Developers using AI services on our platform.
- The SingularityNET community, as it brings our vision of a beneficial democratic Artificial General Intelligence one step closer.
In Deep Funding Round One, funds are divided into two pools of $500K each. Pool A for larger proposals has a $150K maximum per proposal, while Pool B for smaller proposals has a maximum of $40K per proposal. But of course, this will grow over time.
Q.3 What Are the Main Conditions for a Proposal?
The Two Primary Conditions Are as Follows:
- The proposal must align with the vision and mission of SingularityNET – and help us build a beneficial and benevolent AGI.
- The proposal should help the SingularityNET platform grow, either by publishing or utilizing AI services or, alternatively, by supporting marketing or business development.
Q.4 How to Submit Your Proposal
Anyone can submit a proposal; however, the community votes to decide whether to accept. In a nutshell, it’s the token holders and not our team who are responsible for determining AI projects fit to receive funding.
Here Are the Steps You Can Follow to Submit a Proposal:
- Go to www.deepfunding.ai
- Head over to the navigation bar and click on proposals
- And that will take you to our Deep Funding portal developed in partnership with Swae.io.
- Check out the mission tabs and proceed from there.
Q.5 Will There Be a Full 1/2 Inflation Throughout Token Printing for Phase Two?
There is no one-word answer to this. Theoretically, there is inflation; however, this will hardly be noticeable — since AGIX tokens will be minted gradually over 91 years. Additionally, tokens awarded to projects will only be released on a milestone basis as set by the project teams.
Here’s How It Works:
- Projects submit their proposals
- The community suggests, evaluates, and votes on the proposals
- The teams behind the winning proposals will sign their contracts
- The winners get their funds for each delivered milestone
Q.5 Any Thoughts on Differentiating Proposals for Funding New Projects and Proposals for Community Improvements?
You can already propose improvements in our funding process or tools on our proposal portal (the Swae portal.) On the other hand, you can submit a proposal if a specific improvement requires tooling of sorts. Even Swae, our partner, may decide to submit a proposal in this regard when we have identified a substantial improvement specific to our community’s needs.
We also had plans to create Deep funding categories — in DeFi, Gaming, AI, Creative Arts, Music, etc. But we decided not to complicate things during this first round.
Q.6 Has the Cardano Catalyst Project Voting and Proposal Review System Been Considered for Use in the Deep Funding Process?
Initially, we considered starting with Cardano Catalyst however opted against that. We have a good relationship with Cardano and continually exchange ideas on how to improve. In fact, by having two separate platforms, we may learn twice as fast!
Most importantly, we want Deep Funding to be a community-driven initiative, and we can only implement improvements on a platform that we manage ourselves. We already have some features in round one that are different from those in Catalyst, like the two pools system and -later- ‘Grade’ voting in our voting portal, where you can rate projects from 1-10 instead of just yes no.
Therefore, we’ll learn and grow better with our voting and Swae’s ever customizable proposal portals rather than using Cardano at the moment.
Nevertheless, our roads may converge again, and it’s still possible that we may merge with Cardano Catalyst in the future.
Q.7 What is SWAE?
Swae is the company that built our proposal portal, and that is where we rate proposals. However, we have our voting portal for the voting process where members can sign in with a secure wallet login.
Q.8 Which Factors and Conditions Must Be in Place Before Deep Funding Is Handed Over to a Hundred Percent Community Control?
Deep funding will eventually get to where the community runs the whole process.
We Have to Be Ready for That by Ensuring That We Have:
- Sufficient and continued community involvement and support
- Developed our tools and implemented processes with a great degree of confidence
- Created a working incentive system for the community
- Built an acceptable reputation-based system possibly combined with liquid democracy and so on.
Putting the right structure and tools will involve experiments and continuous improvement of tools and processes until we reach a stadium where the whole program is self-sustainable. Thus, we need more time for practice before an eventual 100% community takeover.
Q.9 Is It Fair That if Somebody Has Many Tokens, He Would Like to Have a Lot of Influence?
We can understand the feeling that the principle of “One Token, One Vote” favors large token holders way too much. On the other hand, we believe there is merit in giving decisive power to those with the biggest stake. There is also a pragmatic reason: We don’t want people to start splitting their wallets.
Therefore, it’s inevitable that more tokens will mean more voting power.
We will try to balance this with our reputation-based weighting of activities. On the proposal portal, individuals can distinguish themselves based on their reputation instead of (just) the number of tokens they hold. In the future, we may even consider adding reputation as a factor to the formal voting process, but that is still a long way ahead.
Q.10 What Do You Think About the Price of $AGIX This Year?
We try to make the AGIX economy grow, which will have all kinds of positive effects on the network. The Deep Funding initiative, alongside other exciting SingularityNET projects, has already set the tone. You can complement our efforts by submitting great proposals that would benefit all of us.
Q.11 2022 Roadmap?
We Have Plans to Improve in Different Areas:
The Swae portal today requires a login. But we prefer a solution that will allow you to see what’s inside the portal before logging in and only require a login to interact with the proposals. Swae is currently developing this functionality just for our community.
Another substantial improvement will be a web3 login. Using a wallet login will create limitless possibilities for our program — in the future. Such possibilities might include that:
- Users must have AGIX tokens to rate a project.
- Your token wallet will determine the weight of your ratings.
- We can make your wallet part of your reputation ranking.
We’ll all learn and grow into that super project we’ve always wanted.
Q.12 Would It Be Possible to Keep Our Identities Private on Our Public-Facing Proposals, and We Choose to Use Pseudonyms Instead?
Even better! It’s already possible to submit your vote anonymously. All you have to do is click on anonymous, enter whatever you want, and click submit. Please be careful when using this, as you won’t be able to change it after submitting it. However, we encourage you to be open as this is a community-driven initiative. Please be collaborative, open, creative, and kind — as those are our values at SingularityNET.
Q.13 What Kind of Promotions Can Developers Get From the Platform?
Deep Funding isn’t a one-sided affair. It’s not just about getting funded in AGIX tokens only, but much more. It’s all about getting support and feedback from the community.
Besides feedback, we can also drive exposure for you and your project. We expect the proposing teams to make a 3-5 minutes video introducing themselves and their proposals to the community. And we will post those videos on our YouTube channel and other social media platforms.
Q.14 What Is the Best Way to Support AGIX Tokenomics?
We need AGIX tokens to be utilized within the platform rather than traded elsewhere. The AGIX economy will grow when we seed our AI platform with quality services.
I believe that good services made by students or employees could be helpful on our platform. Could you imagine the effect of 50,000 quality AI services working together by our AI DSL (Domain Specific Language)? That will result in many transactions between software and AI services and between AI services and other AI services.
Q.15 When Can AI DSL Possibly Be Available?
As of now, we are working on our upgraded version. It’s a complex tool that is, in a sense, an AI itself that must be capable of dynamically assembling ten different services into one solution. Indeed, AI DSL is a sophisticated tool that will become a total game-changer to how our AI platform currently works. However, you can publish your services right now and monetize immediately.
Q.16 Can a Participant From One Group Also Participate in Another?
This question could also be asked this way, “can someone from the Expert group also engage in the Feedback group?” The answer is YES. Trying to counter that would give some technical difficulties. However, this act is not without some consequences; a proposer can ask his family and friends to rate them. But we still have a lot to learn from Deep Funding Round One. Anyway, the risks are low and limited to feedback and proposal ratings. Web3 authentication and wallet login will be a great support in solving this challenge, but that won’t happen in round one.
Q.17 Can Users Integrate Their Own Preferred Proposal Creation Tool With Deep Funding and Have the Possibility to Publish Proposals Through API?
Publishing via your API will allow you to publish many proposals fast, which is not what we support. Also, there is a mismatch between the effort required to develop such an API and the gains it will bring: build a whole machinery just to avoid that you might need to copy/paste/tweak some text. All in all, publishing via an API can cause us more harm than good, and we don’t want to deal with spam and large amounts of proposals from an automated system. Therefore, we feel an automated API doesn’t make sense.
Q.18 Do Developers Need Any Understanding of Blockchain Technology to Participate in Deep Funding Successfully?
You don’t need to be knowledgeable about blockchain before submitting your proposal. Deep funding is a community-driven program.
Thus, We Have Two Restricted, Essential Groups in Our Portal:
- The community Experts group and
- A group where proposers can request support from the community.
We will always help a developer that wants to publish their service on the platform. So, a proposer’s little or no knowledge of blockchain should not deter him from submitting his proposal.
Q.19 How Will Deep Funding Be Funded in the Long Run? Where Will the Capital and Liquidity Come From?
As we mentioned earlier, Deep Funding is covered by 30% of the Phase Two tokens, which will be minted over 91 years. Additionally, our AGIX tokens have the potential to go up in value as our platform and technology evolve — which means more liquidity. Then there are the revenue sharing options for the larger grants that would make capital flow back into the Deep Funding wallet. Finally, we may establish partnerships with third parties that might want to sponsor a fund for their purposes or set up joint incubation programs. The possibilities are endless. In the future, we could fund huge capital-intensive projects — but with an agreement that some percentage of the returns would go back to Deep Funding — if they succeed.
Q.20 How Would I Explain Deep Funding to My Grandmother or a Small Child?
Tell this to your 6-year-old, and your grandmother — Deep Funding will support developers to create a big, global brain that would make our lives easier. You can add that the developers would receive funds to help build this massive brain. Tell them that there is a community that decides which developers receive the money to build, and ensures that they deliver on what they promised.
Q.21 How Is Deep Funding Related to SingularityDAO Activities?
We cannot answer this question correctly without telling you about SingularityNET “Spin-Offs” and how Deep Funding is related to them. Our Spin-offs help seed the AI platform with services, and SingularityDAO, NuNet, MindPlex, Rejuve, and TrueAGI are all SingularityNET Spin-offs. Ultimately, Deep Funding might take over the role of SingularityNET in funding and incubating these kinds of startups.
Q.22 Are You Targeting Smart Contract Developers for Deep Funding as Well? They Could Integrate SNET Services Into Smart Contracts.
We welcome every project that would help our platform to grow. Projects can apply Smart contracts to software that uses our services or perhaps use smart contracts in improving the platform itself. But maybe you have ideas we haven’t even thought about yet. So, we are open to all kinds of creative proposals, including smart contracts.
Q.23 Is SNET as a Platform Going to Advertise Itself Among Developers to Let Them Know That It Has Exciting Services Through APIs?
Yes, we are doing that on social media and other channels. Your team can propose creating a sophisticated marketing application to publicize Deep Funding and get funded!
Q.24 Is There Any Tailor-Made Tool for Respective AGIX-USD Conversion?
Users can purchase services from our AI platform without being exposed to AGIX directly by paying with FIAT via Paypal. Currently, there’s no tool for converting AGIX tokens back to USD or another FIAT on the platform. However, that is in the pipeline to be built at some moment.
And that’s it! Thanks a lot for reading and or watching. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out through our social media channels. Looking forward to your proposals!
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