Sahara AI: Building an Open, Fair, and Collaborative Artificial Intelligence Economy

Sahara AI is committed to creating a more open, fair, and collaborative artificial intelligence economic environment, allowing various participants to easily join. Through blockchain technology, Sahara ensures that all contributors (including data providers, annotators, model developers, etc.) can receive fair compensation while safeguarding the sovereignty of data and models, ensuring the security of AI assets, and allowing for the creation, sharing, and trading of permissions.

The Current State of AI Stack

The current AI stack mainly consists of the following layers:

1. Data collection and labeling: Collect data from multiple sources and annotate it according to specific tasks.

2. Model training and services: Input data into the model and optimize performance by adjusting internal parameters.

3. Creation and deployment of AI agents: Generally requires the use of professional tools such as TensorFlow, with high technical requirements.

4. Computing resources: Model training requires a large amount of expensive computing resources.

Although Web2 companies have made progress in these areas, they still face many limitations due to their centralized design. For example, a well-known AI company has built a powerful foundational model and attracted community developers, but only allows superficial prompt customization and does not support underlying model reconstruction. At the same time, all of its computing resources come from investor funding, and it is expected to incur huge losses by the end of this year.

Sahara's AI Collaborative Economy

The Sahara platform provides one-stop services for the entire lifecycle of AI development, covering all aspects from data collection, annotation to model training, services, and then to the creation and deployment of AI agents, as well as multi-agent communication, AI asset trading, and resource crowdsourcing. By democratizing the AI development process and lowering the entry barriers of existing systems, Sahara AI offers equal participation opportunities for individuals, businesses, and communities to jointly build the future of AI.

In the Sahara AI ecosystem, the process of creating, using, and realizing the value of AI assets is clearly recorded and tracked. All transactions within the platform are immutable and traceable, ownership is protected, and the sources of assets are detailedly recorded. This mechanism supports a transparent and fair revenue-sharing model, ensuring that developers and data providers receive appropriate returns for their contributions.

Sahara's goal is to simplify the process for people to participate in the AI economy. Different types of users can use Sahara in the following ways:

• Experienced AI developers: capable of interacting with blockchain and AI stacks using the Sahara SDK and API, customizing computing power, data storage, and incentive structures to create authorized and monetizable AI agents.

• AI Development Beginners: Create and deploy AI assets using a no-code/low-code environment with an intuitive interface and preset templates.

• AI Training Participants: Simply visit a specific website and complete AI training tasks to earn tradeable tokens as rewards.

• AI Users: Easily use AI agents through an intuitive user interface, with flexible options to purchase access, engage in secondary development, and even trade shares of AI assets.

• Enterprise users: Can create their own AI agents (or "business agents"), train them using proprietary data, and leverage decentralized AI agents for generation and service, significantly reducing costs.

Technical Highlights

The Sahara team focused on simplicity and ease of use when designing the system, while also developing several innovative technologies behind the scenes:

• Sahara Blockchain: Minimizes gas fees, fully compatible with EVM, equipped with cross-chain communication protocols for secure, permissionless data transfer.

• AI Native Precompiled (SAPs): Precompiled smart contracts that optimize AI task performance, including training and inference execution SAPs.

• Sahara Blockchain Protocols (SBPs): Manage AI assets, ensuring contribution tracking, reward distribution, and asset registration.

• Data Management: Optimizing data retrieval, security, and availability by combining on-chain and off-chain storage.

• Collaborative Execution Agreement: Supports the development and deployment of joint AI models for cross-AI training, aggregation, and services.

Team and Advisors

Sahara is led by Sean Ren, a tenured professor at the University of Southern California, and Tyler Z, an alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley. The team members come from renowned institutions and companies such as Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, AI2, Toloka, and Stability AI. In addition, Sahara has also received advisory support from several top AI researchers and corporate clients.

Currently, Sahara AI has been adopted by over 35 leading technology innovation projects and research institutions, including some well-known technology companies, universities, and corporate groups, for various AI services such as data collection/labeling and personalized domain agents.

Today, as generative AI is still in its infancy, Sahara AI is working hard to address the bottleneck issues of integrating the AI stack through its unique modular design and the application of blockchain technology, aiming to create an accessible and fair AI future.