Deep Funding update August 2022
Author:
jan
Published:
August 30, 2022
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Dear community members,
As Deep Funding round one is well on its way and the teams are working on their projects, this is a good time for an update on the team’s progress, the overall state of Deep Funding, and the related treasury.
There is ongoing contact with the awarded teams as they are progressing and since this is the first round we are also in the process of setting up the infrastructure and learning what measures, tools, and processes are needed. Let’s start out with some documents where you can find detailed information on the project’s progress yourself before giving an overview of the treasury and other aspects of Deep Funding
Project status report:
“Awarded teams round 1 – Contracts and milestones – PUBLIC”
In this sheet, you will find a summary of each awarded project, the related teams, and on a separate tab all the milestones that have been defined for the project including the related costs payable when the milestones are met. On a separate tab, you will find an overview of all milestones of all projects and their statuses in a single overview. We will keep this sheet updated until all projects are completed.
You can also find updates on the awarded teams on our portal, where we will keep their project proposal pages up to date with the new milestones delivered.
Participant survey 2022-wk 32
This is the first of a regular short survey that we will use to keep track of the team’s progress.
More on the outcomes further below. (The awarded teams overview also has a tab that will link to all survey results + an overview of which teams have filled it out, so you can always find the most recent survey.)
Financial perspective
Summary
In the first round of Deep Funding, 12 projects, proposed by 10 teams, have been awarded by you, our community. Of the total of $1 Million in AGIX, $741,000 has been allocated. At the moment of writing $99,000 worth of AGIX has been disbursed. With the exchange rates at the time of the disbursements, this translates to 2,355,523 AGIX.
Treasury
On August 29th the total amount of minted tokens for the Deep Funding treasury is 57,211,293. Including the already disbursed tokens, the current treasury holds 54,743,106 AGIX. This amount increases each month due to the newly minted tokens and decreases due to disbursements made to the teams on the presentation and approval of a new milestone deliverable.
To get an idea of the treasury status including the outstanding awards, we can take a point in time and calculate the impact if we would disburse all remaining milestones at once on a given average token price.
If we would do this exercise on the date of 30 August, and take an average token price of $0,05, the percentage of tokens that will be needed for round one, relative to the treasury of August, is 23.41%. Should the price go up and we would calculate an average exchange price of say, $0.10 this percentage would be 11.73% (and so on).
This shows that the current treasury status is healthy, but also reminds us of the tight connection to AGIX exchange rates, which is relevant because we are defining the project awards in their Dollar value. The reason for basing the awards on USD is that the teams will need to pay their bills, and most contractors need to be paid in a FIAT currency rather than AGIX. By this measure, we are adding some risk to the Deep Funding treasury due to volatility in the market, but removing risk from the individual teams. Since the disbursements are distributed over time, in relatively small amounts we believe that the impact on the market as well as the risk of bad exchange rates is limited.
Teams progress
- A kickoff with presentations by the teams was presented in a series of 3 lively and interactive Zoom sessions
- Projects Kickoff | Part 1
Featuring:
- Avatar 2 Human Learning,
- Decentralized Physics Simulations
- Simply AI with Trust
- Projects Kickoff | Part 2
Featuring:
- Anti-Fakenews Analytics App
- Grammar-guided genetic programming
- Evolutionary search for robust trading strategies
- Universal Sentence parser
- Projects Kickoff | Part 3
Featuring:
- Risk-Aware Data Generation for SingularityNet Applications
- Risk-aware Assessments of AI Algorithms
- H+DAO Transhumanist Decentralized Projects
- MUSEVERSE: Music into the metaverse
Since the kickoff, the teams have been working steadily on their progress, in different ways.
Of the 10 teams, 7 have signed the contract that is required to get the first disbursement. The other 3 are also progressing but have just not signed due to various (administrative) reasons but are expected to follow very soon.
Note that the teams have quite a bit of freedom to control their own progress speed. Their rewards are tied to the milestones they deliver and payments follow the approval of their milestone deliverables. We are using these milestones to get a better understanding of the team’s progress and help them with any challenges they may experience. While we are always mindful of our responsibility towards the community on good governance of the available funds, we believe that a constructive and supportive dialog with the teams is more productive and beneficial than reducing our role to a rather narrow-minded controlling attitude.
You can get a good overview of their statuses in the 2 files linked above, but some highlights below, including any help they might need.
Carbix / Avatar 2 Human Learning Have released an improved version of their industrial metaverse environment where all the interactions will happen. They would like to add a few more improvements before making a public release, but it’s already looking cool!
- In need of: AI specialists helping out with implementing ASL (Sign language)
Photrek is making good and steady progress with their 2 awarded projects that are targeted at improving data for AI. (Risk-Aware Data Generation for SingularityNet Applications &
Risk-aware Assessments of AI Algorithms). They have delivered a first prototype and are in close collaboration with some SNET people.
Zero2AI is doing wonderful things with Simply AI with Trust. They onboarded the first app from our marketplace on their mobile app and plan to make a generic solution that enables users to get in touch and start using all of our apps in a mobile and user-friendly way. And this is just the beginning of their ambitious plans. Without spilling all the beans here yet, I think their initiatives may potentially become very important for the adoption of our platform!
Robert Haas Had 2 related awarded projects: The generic ‘Grammar-guided genetic programming’ and an incarnation of these tools in ‘Evolutionary search for robust trading strategies’. He is setting up his business, but in the meantime already making great progress by publishing the first 2 G3P (Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming) methods on Github!
- In need of:
- Testers of the alpha version to get early feedback and user impressions
- Proposals for search spaces (like markets and indicators) to serve as an early testing ground for the Evolutionary search project.
Hetzerk – Decentralized Physics Simulations; Justin is going forward steadily at his own pace, developing local ML algorithms that will later be tested on multi GPU devices and perhaps on NuNet.
H+DAO – Transhumanist Decentralized Projects. Natasha is working on the first milestone which involves setting up a proper organization, and sorting out some legalities. Ready to sign the contract shortly, and start building the organization and the DAOMatcher API.
MUSEVERSE- Patrik has not yet signed the contract due to the hassle of setting up a corporation, but they áre making progress on their ‘Music into the metaverse’ project, setting up the team, and building a 3D environment.
Mawu.ai – Anti-fake news Analytics App. Jan has just signed the contract and is getting ready to start after properly handing over his old job so that he can be fully focused on this important project!
Sierk Rosema – Universal Sentence Parser. We have been discussing some administrative issues. While this is still waiting for a final resolution, Sierk will get the contract signed and start working on his solution.
ZRush – A hybrid control system for robot swarms, is making good progress on the first milestone and will be continuing the development and testing of the solution in a 3D environment. This does not only offer a predictable and cheap environment for R&D but will also open up several new use cases for their service, such as recording scenes in a multiverse or recording areas in the real world by a number of drones and then digitizing them into a 3D environment. View their video presentation if you would like to know more (passcode ?f5MLNRX).
Deep funding processes and next steps
Over the past month a number of publications have been issued:
- A three-part blog series on the results of the first voting rounds, learnings, and next steps:
We are currently exploring the best options to organize the next round. We have a regular zoom call with a number of community members in which we discuss important topics regarding the processes and rules around Deep Funding. Everyone is invited to join these calls or join the discussion on our social channels. We recently added some more structure to these calls by creating this list of topics that we address in the meetings using a simple voting mechanism with the participants prior to the call.
Upcoming governance experiment
We are in the process of planning an exciting experimental community vote on some important conditions for the next round and invite all of you to join the discussions. There are 3 different stages in which you can engage with this experiment:
- Helping us prepare the rules and conditions of the experiment. We will have a Community Governance meeting on this in a Zoom call this Wednesday, August 31, 16:00 – 17:30 UTC. See our TG channel or Discord for more details.
- Engage in the experiment by creating a proposal for a question and some possible answers that you believe are relevant for a community vote. Or, equally important, engage by commenting on such proposals, created by others.
- After we have filtered down all proposals to 2 or 3 that are deemed most important, we will ask all community members to cast an official vote in our voting portal and we will incorporate the community-backed measures in the next round!
More details on this process will be shared shortly, pending the outcome of the discussions on our upcoming Community Governance call.
Survey results among the awarded teams
Another perspective on the status of Deep Funding is provided by the experiences of the participants themselves. In a short unpublished survey that extended the participant survey linked above, we asked about their experiences so far. Their feedback is very positive. While not exactly formatted like an NPS score, the NPS score of the ratings from 1-10 would be a whopping 90! However, although most teams rate the program a 9 or even a 10 that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement. On the contrary!
A common request is to get more support and collaboration going from SNET and the other teams. To this end, we have scheduled a periodic Zoom call for the teams to have a chance to collaborate with each other and with some people from SNET. Part of the agenda for the first meeting this week is to decide on the best structure for these calls going forward and how we can best keep the community up to date on the team’s progress, apart from the progress survey linked at the top of this article.
Concluding
Looking back on the previous period, we like to think we got off to a good start. There are some truly promising projects and very enthusiastic teams, and we may be surprised by some of the results! We think we made a good choice in the milestone approach that connects payments to milestones rather than having them done periodically. The grade voting was also a good experiment, but we definitely need further improvement in how we vote and incentivize constructive activities.
As we set out to do from the start we will take learnings from this and continue to experiment and adapt. We hope that over time we will see more teams applying, increase the average quality of the proposals, manage to get more community engagement, get more positive publicity on our platform and our overall mission towards beneficial AGI, and, last but not least, succeed in seeding the platform with good and popular services!
jan
Published:
August 30, 2022
- Share:
-
-
-
Dear community members,
As Deep Funding round one is well on its way and the teams are working on their projects, this is a good time for an update on the team’s progress, the overall state of Deep Funding, and the related treasury.
There is ongoing contact with the awarded teams as they are progressing and since this is the first round we are also in the process of setting up the infrastructure and learning what measures, tools, and processes are needed. Let’s start out with some documents where you can find detailed information on the project’s progress yourself before giving an overview of the treasury and other aspects of Deep Funding
Project status report:
“Awarded teams round 1 – Contracts and milestones – PUBLIC”
In this sheet, you will find a summary of each awarded project, the related teams, and on a separate tab all the milestones that have been defined for the project including the related costs payable when the milestones are met. On a separate tab, you will find an overview of all milestones of all projects and their statuses in a single overview. We will keep this sheet updated until all projects are completed.
You can also find updates on the awarded teams on our portal, where we will keep their project proposal pages up to date with the new milestones delivered.
Participant survey 2022-wk 32
This is the first of a regular short survey that we will use to keep track of the team’s progress.
More on the outcomes further below. (The awarded teams overview also has a tab that will link to all survey results + an overview of which teams have filled it out, so you can always find the most recent survey.)
Financial perspective
Summary
In the first round of Deep Funding, 12 projects, proposed by 10 teams, have been awarded by you, our community. Of the total of $1 Million in AGIX, $741,000 has been allocated. At the moment of writing $99,000 worth of AGIX has been disbursed. With the exchange rates at the time of the disbursements, this translates to 2,355,523 AGIX.
Treasury
On August 29th the total amount of minted tokens for the Deep Funding treasury is 57,211,293. Including the already disbursed tokens, the current treasury holds 54,743,106 AGIX. This amount increases each month due to the newly minted tokens and decreases due to disbursements made to the teams on the presentation and approval of a new milestone deliverable.
To get an idea of the treasury status including the outstanding awards, we can take a point in time and calculate the impact if we would disburse all remaining milestones at once on a given average token price.
If we would do this exercise on the date of 30 August, and take an average token price of $0,05, the percentage of tokens that will be needed for round one, relative to the treasury of August, is 23.41%. Should the price go up and we would calculate an average exchange price of say, $0.10 this percentage would be 11.73% (and so on).
This shows that the current treasury status is healthy, but also reminds us of the tight connection to AGIX exchange rates, which is relevant because we are defining the project awards in their Dollar value. The reason for basing the awards on USD is that the teams will need to pay their bills, and most contractors need to be paid in a FIAT currency rather than AGIX. By this measure, we are adding some risk to the Deep Funding treasury due to volatility in the market, but removing risk from the individual teams. Since the disbursements are distributed over time, in relatively small amounts we believe that the impact on the market as well as the risk of bad exchange rates is limited.
Teams progress
- A kickoff with presentations by the teams was presented in a series of 3 lively and interactive Zoom sessions
- Projects Kickoff | Part 1
Featuring:- Avatar 2 Human Learning,
- Decentralized Physics Simulations
- Simply AI with Trust
- Projects Kickoff | Part 2
Featuring:- Anti-Fakenews Analytics App
- Grammar-guided genetic programming
- Evolutionary search for robust trading strategies
- Universal Sentence parser
- Projects Kickoff | Part 3
Featuring:- Risk-Aware Data Generation for SingularityNet Applications
- Risk-aware Assessments of AI Algorithms
- H+DAO Transhumanist Decentralized Projects
- MUSEVERSE: Music into the metaverse
- Projects Kickoff | Part 1
Since the kickoff, the teams have been working steadily on their progress, in different ways.
Of the 10 teams, 7 have signed the contract that is required to get the first disbursement. The other 3 are also progressing but have just not signed due to various (administrative) reasons but are expected to follow very soon.
Note that the teams have quite a bit of freedom to control their own progress speed. Their rewards are tied to the milestones they deliver and payments follow the approval of their milestone deliverables. We are using these milestones to get a better understanding of the team’s progress and help them with any challenges they may experience. While we are always mindful of our responsibility towards the community on good governance of the available funds, we believe that a constructive and supportive dialog with the teams is more productive and beneficial than reducing our role to a rather narrow-minded controlling attitude.
You can get a good overview of their statuses in the 2 files linked above, but some highlights below, including any help they might need.
Carbix / Avatar 2 Human Learning Have released an improved version of their industrial metaverse environment where all the interactions will happen. They would like to add a few more improvements before making a public release, but it’s already looking cool!
- In need of: AI specialists helping out with implementing ASL (Sign language)
Photrek is making good and steady progress with their 2 awarded projects that are targeted at improving data for AI. (Risk-Aware Data Generation for SingularityNet Applications &
Risk-aware Assessments of AI Algorithms). They have delivered a first prototype and are in close collaboration with some SNET people.
Zero2AI is doing wonderful things with Simply AI with Trust. They onboarded the first app from our marketplace on their mobile app and plan to make a generic solution that enables users to get in touch and start using all of our apps in a mobile and user-friendly way. And this is just the beginning of their ambitious plans. Without spilling all the beans here yet, I think their initiatives may potentially become very important for the adoption of our platform!
Robert Haas Had 2 related awarded projects: The generic ‘Grammar-guided genetic programming’ and an incarnation of these tools in ‘Evolutionary search for robust trading strategies’. He is setting up his business, but in the meantime already making great progress by publishing the first 2 G3P (Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming) methods on Github!
- In need of:
- Testers of the alpha version to get early feedback and user impressions
- Proposals for search spaces (like markets and indicators) to serve as an early testing ground for the Evolutionary search project.
Hetzerk – Decentralized Physics Simulations; Justin is going forward steadily at his own pace, developing local ML algorithms that will later be tested on multi GPU devices and perhaps on NuNet.
H+DAO – Transhumanist Decentralized Projects. Natasha is working on the first milestone which involves setting up a proper organization, and sorting out some legalities. Ready to sign the contract shortly, and start building the organization and the DAOMatcher API.
MUSEVERSE- Patrik has not yet signed the contract due to the hassle of setting up a corporation, but they áre making progress on their ‘Music into the metaverse’ project, setting up the team, and building a 3D environment.
Mawu.ai – Anti-fake news Analytics App. Jan has just signed the contract and is getting ready to start after properly handing over his old job so that he can be fully focused on this important project!
Sierk Rosema – Universal Sentence Parser. We have been discussing some administrative issues. While this is still waiting for a final resolution, Sierk will get the contract signed and start working on his solution.
ZRush – A hybrid control system for robot swarms, is making good progress on the first milestone and will be continuing the development and testing of the solution in a 3D environment. This does not only offer a predictable and cheap environment for R&D but will also open up several new use cases for their service, such as recording scenes in a multiverse or recording areas in the real world by a number of drones and then digitizing them into a 3D environment. View their video presentation if you would like to know more (passcode ?f5MLNRX).
Deep funding processes and next steps
Over the past month a number of publications have been issued:
- A three-part blog series on the results of the first voting rounds, learnings, and next steps:
We are currently exploring the best options to organize the next round. We have a regular zoom call with a number of community members in which we discuss important topics regarding the processes and rules around Deep Funding. Everyone is invited to join these calls or join the discussion on our social channels. We recently added some more structure to these calls by creating this list of topics that we address in the meetings using a simple voting mechanism with the participants prior to the call.
Upcoming governance experiment
We are in the process of planning an exciting experimental community vote on some important conditions for the next round and invite all of you to join the discussions. There are 3 different stages in which you can engage with this experiment:
- Helping us prepare the rules and conditions of the experiment. We will have a Community Governance meeting on this in a Zoom call this Wednesday, August 31, 16:00 – 17:30 UTC. See our TG channel or Discord for more details.
- Engage in the experiment by creating a proposal for a question and some possible answers that you believe are relevant for a community vote. Or, equally important, engage by commenting on such proposals, created by others.
- After we have filtered down all proposals to 2 or 3 that are deemed most important, we will ask all community members to cast an official vote in our voting portal and we will incorporate the community-backed measures in the next round!
More details on this process will be shared shortly, pending the outcome of the discussions on our upcoming Community Governance call.
Survey results among the awarded teams
Another perspective on the status of Deep Funding is provided by the experiences of the participants themselves. In a short unpublished survey that extended the participant survey linked above, we asked about their experiences so far. Their feedback is very positive. While not exactly formatted like an NPS score, the NPS score of the ratings from 1-10 would be a whopping 90! However, although most teams rate the program a 9 or even a 10 that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement. On the contrary!
A common request is to get more support and collaboration going from SNET and the other teams. To this end, we have scheduled a periodic Zoom call for the teams to have a chance to collaborate with each other and with some people from SNET. Part of the agenda for the first meeting this week is to decide on the best structure for these calls going forward and how we can best keep the community up to date on the team’s progress, apart from the progress survey linked at the top of this article.
Concluding
Looking back on the previous period, we like to think we got off to a good start. There are some truly promising projects and very enthusiastic teams, and we may be surprised by some of the results! We think we made a good choice in the milestone approach that connects payments to milestones rather than having them done periodically. The grade voting was also a good experiment, but we definitely need further improvement in how we vote and incentivize constructive activities.
As we set out to do from the start we will take learnings from this and continue to experiment and adapt. We hope that over time we will see more teams applying, increase the average quality of the proposals, manage to get more community engagement, get more positive publicity on our platform and our overall mission towards beneficial AGI, and, last but not least, succeed in seeding the platform with good and popular services!
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