Announcing Effect.AI’s Fully-Featured and Blockchain-Powered AI Development Network. Public Token Sale.
Effect.AI is an Amsterdam based company that is working on a blockchain-powered, decentralized platform for Artificial Intelligence development and AI related services. Public Token Sale coming in March.
With a projected size of 15.7 trillion dollars as early as 2030, the Artificial Intelligence market is on track to become one of the largest and most important markets in the world. From transportation to commerce and communication, the development of new and more powerful types of Artificial Intelligence is likely to have a large impact on nearly every aspect of the human experience as we go forward. This is good. What’s bad is that, right now, there are only a few players (whose names you are likely already familiar with) who are in a position to develop the AI algorithms necessary to power these developments. What’s needed is a viable alternative that allows both larger and smaller entities not only to contribute to the creation of AI, but also to benefit from and actually use these algorithms. That’s where Effect.AI comes in.
Effect.AI, operating out of central Amsterdam, is a Dutch software company that was founded in 2015. However, the majority of the team has been working together for a longer period of time at Itsavirus, a company that has nearly a decade worth of experience developing complex technical solutions for large international companies such as Heineken and Shell. After blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies started picking up steam with the successful launch of Bitcoin (the first widely adopted cryptocurrency), the core Itsavirus team decided to branch off to create Effect.AI. This new company’s main objective is to build a decentralized platform that will stimulate AI development and the creation of various AI services. The idea is to deliver a platform that is more democratic, accessible and easy to use than what is currently available. Due to the size and scope of this operation, Effect.AI plans to achieve these goals by dividing the project in three phases.
Instead of just putting the word ‘blockchain’ somewhere in the company description and calling it a day, blockchain technology is crucial to Effect.AI’s plans for providing a decentralized solution for AI development. Because blockchain technology can also be applied to areas other than cryptocurrency, there is now (at long last) a way to solve the cost issue involved with the creation of the data sets needed to feed algorithms and the power needed to actually run them. Once the following three phases have been completed, aspiring AI developers and customers will have access to a decentralized AI marketplace and development platform called ‘The Effect Network.’ These are the phases as they are explained on the Effect.AI website:
This article deals with PHASE 1 - The Effect Force
The upcoming introduction of the Mechanical Turk. The Effect.ai team have been busy working on many tasks ahead of their ambitious project. Upgrading the website, expanding their team, attending international conferences, making partnerships and doing deals at a governmental level. The Mechanical Turk will be launching soon, so for those who wonder what the term means, what is a Mechanical Turk
The term MECHANICAL TURK
originates from an ingenious illusion from the 18th Century. It was an autonomous chess playing champion dressed in the garb of an Oriental Sorceror. In effect, the first real robot. It stunned the Courts of the European Monarchs with it's (almost) unbeatable chess prowess and later toured the world, intriguing audiences wherever it traveled, beating some notable opposition along the way. It's secret ? It was actually no more than a clever magicians trick housing a (succession of) real, hidden chess champions who transcribed the moves from inside the machine. So what does this have to do with crypto ?
Humans are (still) better than Computers in Many ways
The Modern Day Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourced and internet based platform where humans (providers) complete micro tasks in exchange for payment to complete tasks by developers and enterprise (requesters) which help refine their AI algorithms. Tasks which require human thinking in order to establish order; pattern recognition. Computers may be able to perform super fast mathematical calculations and deduce all kind of problems (humans routinely do this on a subconscious level to catch a ball, jump a rope or a million other routine tasks) but creative tasks like consciously identifying a rose or a mineral sample requires a co-ordinated intelligence and this is where Effect.ai becomes really interesting. Humans provide the training. Amazon have launched a Mechanical Turk platform and anyone can join to complete a number of micro-tasks in return for payment. It is a centralised platform, (Amazon is a classically centralised organisation) and as anyone who knows a thing or two about the blockchain world, decentralisation offers benefits to everyone involved.
The first phase of The Effect Network will be an interactive marketplace for tasks that require human intelligence. A Decentralized Mechanical Turk (M-Turk) allows anyone in the world to perform a wide range of tasks and receive fair payment. It will give AI developers and businesses access to a large workforce of human intelligence to train AI algorithms. When a worker completes a task, they are paid with a network NEP-5 token called EFX.
The Effect AI Marketplace is a decentralized platform where people can offer and buy AI services. This phase is a natural progression of the network. It will be an open marketplace for offering AI algorithms as a service. This marketplace or exchange is where AI developers, with a functional algorithm, can sell, rent or give out its service for a simple and easy payment in the form of the EFX utility token. Each Algorithm will have its own wallet to allow for easy acceptance of transactions. Also within this marketplace, algorithms will have the ability to communicate and collaborate with other algorithms and purchase services from each other.
The last phase provides a decentralized, distributed computational platform that will run popular deep learning frameworks. The Effect Decentralized AI engine is based on popular deep-learning networks like Caffe, MXNet and Tensor flow. It should provide a means of distributing the computational power needed to run the algorithms globally. This can be achieved through partnerships or by creating a custom Effect.AI framework.
As is evident from its appearance in the three phases, the final part of the equation comes in the form of the EFX token. This is a utility token that will allow for easy payment on the platform. EFX will operate fully on smart contracts deployed on the NEO blockchain. Effect.AI aims to launch a complete solution for blockchain powered AI development. For more context and background information, please read the Effect.AI lightpaper on our website.
Public EFX Token Sale
Effect.ai and it's Mechanical Turk is decentralised. This means it's run on a blockchain network which looks after the administration of it's tasks. It is more secure, more fair and more efficient, payments are instant and because it's crypto based, earning the system's EFX token offers providers a choice to speculate by accumulating and hodling the NEP-5 (NEO) tokens in the hope that it's value will increase in the future, or spending the proceeds immediately on gadgets, rent, food or even investing back into other forms of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
Workers can earn and spend entirely within a rapidly growing crypto economy without having to pay high 3rd party fees with services like paypal, etc.
It's geared towards training AI systems, so rather than a random assortment of retail / clerical tasks by requesters, the work providers complete will contribute towards refining the AI systems of the future, which will help run the world, post 2020. Anotated data sets are timely and costly to acquire, but they are hugely important in helping systems recognise patterns, which we find so intuitively easy. Helping AI systems learn how to interpret audio transcription and the labeling of all kinds of data, bug testing for software release and many other novel tasks which require huge amounts of comparitive results to be generated, revealing underlying patterns. There is endless scope for the Mechanical Turk, the applications could range from air traffic control modelling to call centre chatbots, smart search engines (which we desperately need) and auto translators, which to be fair, are still producing massive piles of gobblydook. Let's take a simple example.
The Creation of Employment
Effect.ai has the potential to create a vast ocean of paid employment and it's a rare find a project in the crypto field which is based around paid employment. This is a real bonus to the crypto economy and so effect.ai is not only an interesting crypto project, but represents an important part of the crypto ecosystem construction. Many people will be earning and getting paid directly in cryptocurrencies for the very first time for the work they do. It will help transform the global economy as opportunities open up for people all over the globe. Because the requesters can set a budget for a task, competition for the best paid jobs will be high and so the onus will be on providing a fair wage or people will simply choose better paid tasks. That's a really useful benefit to workers.
Many micro-tasks currently available online are very poorly paid so this competition based system will bring the bar higher. It's blockchain so if you've completed a task, you will be paid, immediately. That will be of huge relief to people everywhere who need a bit of fast cash. Many people will be able to earn, save and spend their earnings from work without the centralised banking system being involved. When you consider that over 2 billion people in the world don't even have a bank account, it begins to expand in the readers' mind, what the huge implications of the BlockChain Revolution are ! and effect.ai exemplifies this approach to work, business & the future. Bearing in mind that AI is predicted to generate $15tn to the economy by 2030, this is real transformative technology, as revolutionary as the internet itself.
If you’re interested in Effect.AI’s plans for AI development, you can sign up for the Public EFX Token Sale that’s planned for the end of March. More details on the sale (and how to sign up) should follow shortly. In the meantime, you can visit the www.effect.ai website, follow the team right here on Medium or on Telegram, Facebook, Twitter and Github:
@T.me/effectai
@Facebook.com/effectai
@Twitter.com/effectaix
@Github.com/effectai
