White Star Capital Digital Asset Fund - announcing our investment in Alethea AI
Creator of the iNFT standard of interactive and intelligent characters
We are very happy to announce our investment into the $16m token round of Alethea AI, the creator of the iNFT standard. We invested alongside Galaxy Digital, Multicoin, Alameda, Gemini, Metapurse, Crypto.com, and leading angels such as Mark Cuban & Meltem Demirors.
We have been thinking about the future of the NFT space for quite some time when we were introduced to Arif, Akib & Ahmad. We were immediately blown away by Arif’s vision for the future of intelligent NFTs, extending their utility beyond the existing landscape of gaming items, digital collectibles, and digital art.
In Arif’s introduction of iNFTs to the world, he sets out Alethea AI’s vision clearly:
The NFT revolution today is in its infancy, and represents a global redemption and courageous rebalancing by the creative working class. However, we risk committing an exponentially larger sin of omission, with greater consequences if we neglect a critical and important dimension of NFTs: Programmability, with a specific focus on programmable intelligence (AI).
NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media. The media can be anything digital, including art, videos, music, gifs, games, text, memes, and code. — Chris Dixon, General Partner a16z Crypto
Chris’ description serves as an important baseline for V1 of NFTs but is an incomplete vessel to contain the coming Intelligence Revolution. While most NFTs have embedded code defining royalty payouts, we have yet to scratch the surface of the programmable NFT design space as part of the NFT medium.
An iNFT is an intelligent NFT that is embedded with a GPT-3 prompt as part of its immutable smart contract. The iNFT generated is not only perceivably intelligent but has both interactive and animation capabilities as carefully crafted prompts such as hashes, are stored at the smart contract layer. The hardcoded prompts call upon a state-of-the-art Transformer Language model to facilitate generative possibilities only possible through recent breakthroughs in few-shot and single-shot learning.
More recently, Alethea AI has teamed up with artist Robert Alice to bring a virtual being to life. The virtual being, named Alice, can have rich conversations with people, based on the personality that Robert Alice made. Using NFT technology, Alethea AI has ensured that she is a one-of-a-kind creation. Alethea AI held a successful auction at Sotheby’s where the final selling price came in at $479k!
We are incredibly excited about the Alethea AI journey. You can stay up to date with Alethea AI’s progress on Twitter and Telegram.