Cardano-Powered Generative AI Services

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Nimrod Flores

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Not Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

6

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

We will provide widely popular generative AI services such as image, text, music and video generation and require only staked Cardano accounts to access, or payment of ADA or Cardano native tokens.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependencies.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

No

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

We will be utilizing open-source and readily available AI models at the core of the generation services but the user interfaces, gating mechanisms and backend resources allocation, will be proprietary as these things are very specific implementations that vary with each organization.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Why this is important to Cardano:

One of the great hurdles for adoption and use of crypto assets is that they are not yet required in order to access generally needed services. As it stands right now, this is even more true for Cardano.

If we'd like more people to use ADA and Cardano native tokens, there should be more products and services that can only be accessed with a Cardano wallet at a minimum, or with payment in ADA or some CNT's.

We are referring to products and services that are not crypto-related or those used only in the crypto space such as dexes, defi lending, NFT marketplaces. What we need are products and services that are actually used by people whether they're in crypto or not.

Our solution:

Over the past months, we have set our sights on generative AI services. This category of services is already proven to be widely popular, with services such as ChatGPT boasting 180 million users as of this writing, and Midjourney, 16+ million users.

There's also good availability of high-quality open-source AI models with comparable performance to their proprietary counterparts. The technology is already there. They are just very inconvenient for the average person to use on their own devices because they usually require considerable compute resources and disk space. There is also the technical qualifications required for installing and running.

What we need is to provide the necessary hardware, put these tech into use, and give people a compelling offer as an alternative to the current ones available. And that is what we want to build.

What's unique about our solution:

Most generative AI services out there right now, offer very limited free tiers (free credits). After using up the free credits, users will then have to pay (often expensive) fees to get more credits.

We believe we can offer a better deal.

Instead of directly paying for the services in fiat, users can just stake ADA to get usage credits + staking rewards every epoch. The number of credits they get will be commensurate to the amount of their stake.

They can also stake native tokens such as WMT and get usage credits every month. And we can also integrate other projects with staking programs later on.

With this arrangement, instead of spending fiat currency outright, users are actually even earning from their ADA and native tokens while using the services.

For users who need more credits, they can also directly buy more with ADA or other supported native tokens.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

With this project, a new, practical use case will be available for ADA and some of its native tokens. It benefits the whole Cardano community by adding utility to Cardano and onboarding new users who are previously outside of even the broader crypto space.

It's also very likely that this project will be one of the prominent users of other Cardano-based infrastructure services like Iagon and NuNet since this project will require a lot of the resources provided by those other projects.

We can measure this impact by looking at the number of users who will sign up and use the services. We will also be monitoring the actual usage statistics without personally-identifiable info.

Additionally, we'll be looking out for users of our service who produce content that enabled them to pursue new opportunities, whether for personal fulfillment or for reaching business goals; users who openly share their results on social media.

Details of our measurable impact will be regularly published on a blog maintained by our team and on social media.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Development of the whole service infrastructure will be led by myself, the main proposer. I've been building web apps since 2012 using PHP, Python, and for the most part, JS. I've also managed bare metal and cloud servers since 2014; and have been the operator of PHRCK stake pool which has been in operation and continuously producing blocks since the very start of mainnet staking on Cardano.

Some of the apps I've built on Cardano are the following:

• Detokenizer service (for unlocking ADA from unwanted CNTs)
• Smart contract powered NFT staking for Havoc Worlds NFT project
• PHRCK's Bulk Asset Sender (in use since May 2021)

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Complete the initial backend infrastructure of scalable compute and storage resources

Initial usable image generation service

Initial usable text-to-speech service

Initial usable music generation service

Image to video generation service

Close out report

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

1. Nimrod Flores

• Twitter
• Website
• Medium
• Github
• Youtube

For this project, we will be working with 2 to 3 more developers (at least 1 front-end and another 1 back-end dev) if funded.

For marketing and business development, initial discussions have been done with the team composing the NECTO Earth Node for World Mobile which the main proposer is also a part of.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

$4,000/mo - lead dev

$3,000/mo - back-end dev

$6,000/mo - 2 front-end devs

$4,000/mo - servers/hardware

$8,000/mo - marketing and promotion expenses starting after delivery of first publicly usable service

$25,000/mo total x 6 months = $150,000

at $0.50 = 300,000 ADA

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The initial funding will get these services up and running in order to produce the "impact" described above.

After the initial funding, the service will then be sustained by the staking rewards earned by the stake pools and other revenue-generating nodes operated by the project and its partners, plus the additional revenues from direct sales of usage credits.

This will be a project that will continue to give value back to the Cardano community long after the initial development work has been delivered.