Ericcg
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By popular demand, here's a detailed post about caffeine.ai and the forthcoming "self-writing internet" (SWI) paradigm we in the ICP community are working to realize 🌐🧠
If you prefer pics, checkout my deck at deck.icp.ai. Otherwise here goes...
Caffeine is meant for everybody. Using natural language, anybody will be able to create sovereign websites, web apps and internet services.
It might be an individual wanting to create something like a personal branding website, wedding planning app for their family, or portal for a sailing club. It might be an entrepreneur lauching an e-commerce website, or a sharing economy app with advanced Web3 rails. It might be a company or gov. dept. that needs a corporate portal, or some specific CRM (Customer Relationship Managment), ERP (Enterprise Resource Processing) or ARP (Accounts Receivable Processing) functionality.
The SWI paradigm is broad, and it involves anyone and everyone being able to create and own anything online from scratch, just by talking to AI. Over time, as the paradigm becomes more and more powerful, this will increasingly empower, democratize and decentralize tech worldwide.
Today, Large Language Models (a type of AI) have already become very good at writing code, and their abilities are continuing to improve rapidly. The Caffeine platform leverages this ability in combination with new specialized SWI infrastructure and technology that is being deployed to the Internet Computer network. This new tech infra has been especially designed to empower and enable AI to build effectively and safely solo on receipt of natural language instructions, without receiving any technical assistance from humans.
Caffeine has also been carefully designed to allow technical people, such as engineers and user experience designers, to build alongside AI, with purposes such as accelerating time-to-market, dramatically reducing costs while increasing quality, and using the AI as a tutor to learn new skills.
It's important to know that AI building apps solo is only one part of the SWI paradigm. It also involves apps and services being created on the decentralized internet, rather than inside some company's proprietary centralized platform, and drawing on this difference to provide 4 very important, defining characteristics:
1. Sovereignty
The SWI paradigm produces apps and services that become accessible via URLs (the addresses we enter into web browsers) that are *sovereign.* This property results from them being entirely hosted (running) on a decentralized, public network, in exactly the same way a bitcoin token lives on the Bitcoin blockchain. They are constructed from secure network-resident code/next-generation smart contracts, without any centralization or traditional backend IT needing to be involved, such as cloud computing services. This means that apps are not dependent on intermediaries that might censor them, or which might inflict harmful actions like massively hiking prices, which services typically seek to make them captive customers by locking them into their platforms. In addition, the underlying software and data of apps created by SWI belongs exclusively to their owners (which might be humans, an organization, DAO or yet another kind of entity), further preventing intermediaries gaining leverage. In production, these sovereign apps are controlled by a wallet (or assigned to a DAO, say), rather than a cloud account operated by a company.
2. Tamperproof security
Those building using traditional IT often euphemistically say their web apps and services are "secure," because they have carefully configured their cloud accounts to prevent exploits, and have purchased cybersecurity measures to protect hosted platform software like databases and their traditional custom code. However, in reality, such traditional IT infrastructure can never be truly secure, since the cybersecurity protections involved are highly fallible. In complete contrast, the websites, web apps and internet services created on SWI are "tamperproof," which means they are fundamentally secure, and don't need traditional cybersecurity measures for extra protection. This makes it much easier for AI to build solo, and also frees app owners from having to trust that centralized traditional IT service providers and SaaS platforms will successfully keep their data and systems secure using cybersecurity systems, which they cannot guarantee even if they wish to, because traditional IT is fundamentally insecure, and can only be patched by cybersecurity measures.
3. Updatable in production
The SWI paradigm requires that the owners of the apps and services produced can update them almost in real-time, simply by issuing additional natural language instructions to an AI, essentially evolving them at chat speed (in practice, with owners issuing instructions, and then refreshing the URL where their app is located). If you are non-technical, I need to tell you that this requirement is far more challenging than it might sound. Firstly, the process of upgrading/updating apps running in production must be sufficiently swift to occur at chat speed, which requires that the data involved can be transformed into new formats quickly. Secondly – and this is the really tough one – it is required that when the AI modifies the underlying software logic, and performs any required transformations/migrations of the app's data, that no data is accidentally lost, for example because the AI has made a mistake, which LLMs will continue to do because of the way they work, even as their overall abilities continue to improve.
4. Trustless Web3
SWI apps can incorporate many different types of functionalities, including AI functionalities. But there is a form of functionality that cannot be safely implemented on traditional IT stacks: Web3 functionality. SWI apps can securely hold and process tokens on multiple blockchains, trustlessly and seamlessly incorporating them into their own functionality, without requiring users use cumbersome traditional crypto wallets, which undermine user experience, and are themselves are vulnerable to hacks. The Internet Computer, in combination with the traditional blockchains it is directly interoperable with, forms a World Computer. The Internet Computer already hosts many onchain services that process tokens from multiple traditional chains, without the involvement of bridges and other systems that are often centralized in practice (note that in Web3, oftentimes people refer to apps built in a centralized way using traditional IT, which run on servers and compute platforms like Amazon Web Services, as "onchain," simply because they have an associated token, but in reality of course they are not, and therefore, cannot provide these guarantees). A great example of what's possible with the fully network-resident paradigm is , OpenChat, an open internet service that runs on the Internet Computer, which enables its users to instantly send bitcoins, ETH and SOL inside chat messages (the Internet Computer's "chain key" technology enables it to play the role of a kind of Layer 2 for blockchain assets). SWI will be able to build apps and services with similar functionality. Where required, those apps can also maintain their own treasuries using stablecoins (e.g. tokenized dollars) and other crypto innovations.
DFINITY is performing a wide range of technical work related to SWI. For example, we have an AI team that works with LLMs to make them better at coding SWI apps using specialized training and RAG infrastructures, and we are working to make efficient, seamless ICP network scaling even better, in anticipation of increased demands on the network created by SWI, and many other things, but in this post I'll talk more about our Motoko work.
Technical note (skip don't balk!): The Internet Computer hosts an entire serverless cloud, in which canister smart contracts are hosted and run, within a "virtual execution environment," which leverages the WebAssembly/Wasm virtual machine. (The virtual execution environment is hosted with the network's stateful decentralized network protocol, which is called Internet Computer Protocol, or ICP, which the network's sovereign node machines process).
This means both human developers, and AI, can write code in any programming language that compiles to Wasm byte code. Several languages are now popular in the ecosystem.
However, back in 2018, 3 years before the network launched, DFINITY decided to develop a completely new programming language for ICP platforms, called Motoko. Aside from applying advanced emerging concepts in programming language design, we were pursuing a number of objectives with Motoko:
1) To create a new, broadly accessible, simple-to-learn language, that was nonetheless powerful enough to build complex systems (addressing shortcomings of simple languages like JavaScript).
2) To create a language that leveraged special aspects of the Wasm virtual machine standard.
3) To create a language that was specifically designed for the Internet Computer's virtual execution environment, and some of the incredible advancements in the field of compute that it provides (in technical speak, Motoko is DSL/domain specific language).
Motoko is far more sophisticated and powerful than something like Solidity or Move, and developing a new language from scratch is not a simple undertaking, but we set to the task.
We were no doubt helped by the team being initially led by Andreas Rossberg, a co-inventor of WebAssembly, and leader within the Wasm community, who joined the DFINITY team in early 2017. He helped form a brilliant languages team, which continues to carry the torch today.
At some point, we realized that when AI builds solo, it might benefit from a language like Motoko, and thus, critical aspects of the language's design are being developed to empower human and AI developers alike.
Prima facie, without any special training, LLMs coding using Motoko already make far less mistakes than using Rust, an increasingly popular modern systems-programming language – despite their being far more training material available for Rust, in the form of online documentation, and open source code repositories.
But by developing special materials for training LLMs, and new technologies for Motoko, we are taking this much further.
One of the key advancements provided by ICP, is that software runs within a compute environment that providing something called "orthogonal persistence" (but don't balk, this is easy, keep reading!!)
This essentially means that software logic runs within persistent memory pages, and it's no longer necessary for developers to use database servers and file systems to persist data. In a sense, logic and data have become one, because developers can just define logical abstractions, and the data then automatically persists within them.
In summary, orthogonal persistence:
1) Massively simplifies software design, making it more abstract, which greatly helps AI.
2) Improves performance, since application data no longer has to be copied in and out of databases and files (this is part of the magic that allows, say, a social network to be built on the Internet Computer, while there is still not a single traditional blockchain that cfan store a simple photo taken with a phone).
Motoko development is leaning into orthogonal persistence, and I expect within 10 days, will release "enhanced orthogonal persistence," or "EOP," which takes things further still, especially with respect to AI empowerment.
With EOP, when canister smart contracts written in Motoko are upgraded, where the structure of data does not need to be transformed, it can be left completely alone during upgrades. This is another simplification, which will greatly help human and AI developers alike. But there's more...
When the SWI paradigm creates complex web applications and services online, inevitably changes to the structure of data in memory may occur.
For example, image an e-commerce website, with a Product object. The owner of the site might decide they wish to add comments functionality to listed products, which would require a Comments field being added to Product. At this stage, during the upgrade, the old Products objects must be transformed into new Products objects, and with EOP, some migration logic must thus be created.
EOP ensures that transformations can occur quickly, which is crucial for allowing SWI apps and services to be upgraded at chat speed, but it also addresses an even more important need.
Due to their design, LLMs will always occasionally hallucinate, and even though they are smart, they will make mistakes (and considering they are coding hundreds of times faster than humans, this is no surprise). What then if an AI building solo makes a mistake in the migration logic, causing app or service data to be lost?
For example, what if the AI defined the new Product format, adding the required comments feature, but in the process caused previously entered product data to be lost? (Of course, Caffeine will provide snapshotting and restore functionality, but this is last resort, not something a non-technical developer simply talking to build will want to use.)
The answer is that in EOP, when an upgrade is installed, the Motoko language platform checks the migration logic against the currently installed version to check that no data will be lost – and simply fails if it would be, forcing the AI to try again.
This is called "loss safe" programming, and it was invented at DFINITY.
I understand this is a bit of a technical story, but hopefully you can see that the "updatable" requirement of SWI is challenging to implement in practice, and thus that EOP delivers another groundbreaking ICP advance that will help AI and human builders alike.
None of this comes easy. Many aspects of EOP were envisaged back in the early days, but it has taken many years to realize the technology.
What is clear, is that AI must be empowered to build solo, because that is the future: AI is not human, and in the SWI paradigm, AI is required to build and update apps and services extremely rapidly, at the speed of chat.
To make all this possible, the bottom line is that AI requires its own environment to build in.
ICP already provides a tamperproof compute environment, so that a mistake by AI cannot lead to a hack and data exfiltration, or the installation of ransomware say – it is truly secure.
ICP already provides an unstoppable compute environment, relieving AI of the need to create things like failover and backup and restore systems, massively further simplifying software logic, enabling the AI to focus on what, not how, and further reducing the risk a mistake might cause data to be lost.
Now, Motoko's EOP will further accelerates upgrades on ICP, allowing them to run at chat speed, and most importantly, creates guardrails that prevent a simple mistake by AI causing data to be lost.
Of course, this is not all, and over time, I will have more to share with you about our SWI work.
What I hope I have conveyed, is that SWI is a new and emerging technical field, which is one that the Internet Computer, and the ICP community, is uniquely positioned to capitalize upon
In the future, human developers will build alongside AI developers (to reduce friction, we are also developing an in-browser development environment, called icp.ninja).
But also in the future, all 8 billion humans on earth without technical skills will also gain the ability to develop and own tamperproof and unstoppable sovereign websites, web apps and internet services, just by speaking in their local natural language.
When we release Caffeine, that will be only a beginning of a long and incredible journey into the future.
The SWI paradigm has no limits. As AI gets smarter, and as Caffeine, and the underlying SWI technology and infrastructure on the Internet Computer improves, it will be possible to create increasingly advanced apps and services.
Individuals, entrepreneurs, businesses, and governments, will increasingly choose to leverage SWI to create sovereign custom apps and services that are completely under their control, that they can update, customize and improve just by talking at any time of their choosing, and which slash their time to market and costs by orders of magnitude compared to today's tech – and the total addressable market will become unimaginably vast.
We want the SWI to explode on the Internet Computer, and are working towards that goal.
More news soon 💪
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Say hello to a massive acceleration of AI smart contracts 🧠 on the Internet Computer #ICP blockchain.
Brilliant work by the @dfinity team has accelerated deterministic floating point instructions by 10X. We continue on our mission to run sophisticated LLMs as smart contracts 👊⚡️🔥
In the demo, image classification is now running 3X+ faster (across 3-4 blocks through consensus compared to 10-12 before). Naturally, the gas/cycles costs of AI inference has come down commensurately.
The acceleration was achieved through broad low-level work, which includes commits to the public Wasmtime virtual machine implementation of WebAssembly.
Coming optimizations will take us much further.
The next optimization will include the integration of SIMD instructions into the smart contract execution environment, which will allow multiple floating point calculations to be performed in parallel through the execution of a single instruction.
Something crucial: also in near sight, is the migration of the ICP smart contract environment from 32-bit Wasm to 64-bit Wasm, which will scale the number of AI model weights that can be loaded into contract memory from 2B to whatever is needed for sophisticated LLMs.
Somewhat further away, is the provision of new APIs allowing canister smart contract code to export AI computations for accelerated processing on GPUs.
This will require substantial work to address the challenges of achieving deterministic computation directly on the silicon, and for the community to agree a new public spec for node machines that pack GPUs, and to add compliant blockchain nodes to the network.
Together, these improvements will unlock further orders of magnitude acceleration of AI smart contract inference (and potentially training).
We believe that in the future vast numbers of AI models will run as smart contracts, which will prevent them being hacked (and thus the sensitive data they ingest being stolen), make them unstoppable, make them transparent, and where needed, allow them to run autonomously – for example for purposes such as KYC or EVM smart contract verification/certification.
In the future, you will be able to have a conversation with a blockchain, and ask it to do reasoning for you.
In this bright future, on-chain AI will be at the heart of Web3 – and to be clear, the Internet Computer's chain key technology will allow direct trustless integration with smart contracts on traditional chains such as Ethereum, Solana and NEAR.
Join the #ICP mission to run the most impactful AI models on blockchain as smart contracts, and help make the Internet Computer the "everything computer."
Join next week's Global R&D for details about the low-level deterministic floating point optimizations.
Thanks for following 💪
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It’s time to CELEBRATE the finale of the first ever web3 series.
This is a huge milestone for DeadHeads and web3 as a whole… THANK YOU to everyone in our community for making it possible.
Every end is the start of something new. Well, shii..
youtu.be/ORKmyqIsa7U
YouTube
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I hear people like free mints...
Fuck it, watch our Season Finale premiere tomorrow @ 9pm EST and get ready for something special within the episode 👀
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"Well, I’ve come this far… Guess there’s no point in turning back now. Season finale this Thursday (7/21)" - Damien
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