Introducing Sahara

Not many artificial intelligence/web3 startups come out of stealth with more than 30 enterprise clients. But we did! Funds are flowing into our ecosystem and beginning to turn a flywheel that will foster a new way to live and work with AI.

Sahara is the first decentralized AI network that enables everyone to deploy autonomous AI freely and securely. We use the privacy, security, and incentive mechanisms of web3 and combine them with our proprietary technological framework to offer a high-performance, privacy-first network with fair rewards based on contributions and provenance.

AI is largely a public good, developed from collective intelligence - the combined knowledge of millions. The Sahara Network aims to redefine the way we work and live in the era of AI. In parallel with developing our network, we’re introducing the Collaborative Economy: the new economic system for monetization and attribution that will allow all participants on the network to benefit from the work they contribute, whether it’s operating a node, contributing knowledge and data, fine-tuning a model, or building an autonomous agent.

To be useful, autonomous AI must be fast, personalized, and painless to use. It must also protect its users’ privacy, guarantee the provenance of their data, and foreground the human experience. Not just the users’ own experience but that of society as a whole.

Why a Decentralized AI Network Is Necessary

For decades, there has been a trade-off between privacy and the benefits of data and what would become artificial intelligence. Applications like recommender systems, search, and free apps, all accumulate private data to improve their features over time. There’s always been friction between users and the platforms controlling access to online content and commerce, but now we’ve reached an inflection point. 

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. All of a sudden anyone with a computer could have access to AI capable of generating usable text or code, and entire categories of employment were under threat. An early study showed an immediate impact on Upwork, the digital casual labor market, with freelance artists, writers, and developers losing wages and offers of work. Today, AI outperforms humans in fields like translation and summarization and will soon surpass them in many others.

These knowledge models were made from agglomerations of Github, Wikipedia, Reddit, and other user-created knowledge databases. We’ve all contributed to large AI models, but only a tiny fraction of us have seen a material benefit from doing so. This model won’t last much longer. As AI continues to improve, users who contribute data to centralized AI models will eventually be replaced or heavily impacted. The solution is to disintermediate the underlying infrastructure and find a way to keep proprietary data in the hands of consumers and allow them to be compensated for the use of their data. In short, we need to develop a decentralized AI infrastructure with high performance, privacy, and provenance. 

Introducing the Collaborative Economy 

We are defining a new economic model for the Age of AI that will benefit everyone and allow anyone to participate in the AI economy. To do so, we’re building a decentralized AI network that will facilitate secure, private, ownership-preserving exchanges of data and AI models derived from user-proprietary data. 

“Everyone adds a little grain of sand”–Sean Ren, Sahara CEO and co-founder. 

Think of it as a self-sustaining collaborative economy that anyone, regardless of level of expertise can participate in: anyone can contribute to data collection, labeling, and training efforts. These combined efforts produce domain knowledge models, offering expertise in specific realms that can be combined with proprietary knowledge to create custom Knowledge Agents (KAs) that can be scaled up and monetized with fees flowing to everyone who had a hand in their creation. 

Everyone shares in the provenance and ownership of the new economy including knowledge developers, knowledge providers, compute providers, execution node operators, validators, knowledge consumers, and many more to be explored

The Sahara Network: Infrastructure and Applications

Sahara is building the world’s best decentralized AI infrastructure and, when combined with Sahara Data (our marketplace, detailed below) can rapidly serve both user needs whether they are individuals or businesses, protecting their data, offering high performance, and ensuring their work is properly attributed and controlled throughout the network. 

Here’s how it works. Sahara’s Network consists of two layers:

The Execution Layer

The Execution Layer supports the deployment of AI, essentially data, models, and KAs, while maintaining four key properties: high performance, decentralization, privacy, and provenance (trace of ownership and attribution — an influence function for data attribution). Here, individual nodes secure data storage, transfer data between nodes, and facilitate applications like Sahara Data and KAs (Knowledge Agents). 

High Performance is maintained through decentralized Low-Rank Adoption of LLM models (LoRA) for hypertuning models. There’s end-to-end reward maximization, allowing customization and evolution; secure data handling and dynamic data management, and privatized parameter handling with personalized adaptation and plug-and-play parameters. 

Privacy is maintained through the use of privacy-preserving training and inference. User personal data can be securely stored in private nodes or decentralized public nodes, and trained using cryptographic methods.

Provenance consists of proof of ownership: i.e. digital water-marking and a commitment scheme, and data storage and access: a public key infrastructure, and AES encryption. Data transportation is secured using private computing and homomorphic encryption. 

Without an execution layer, the provenance and attribution of personal knowledge capital would not work. With an Application Layer, we can democratize the current AI economy and push for a collaborative economy.

The Application Layer 

The Application Layer sits on top of the execution layer and is where the proverbial magic happens. There are several systems, including a natively built-in data marketplace for data collection, labeling, and accessing that No Other AI network in web3 has today.

Sahara ID: Users belong to Sahara’s reputation system, which provides both provenance and security in the form of exclusive access to their Personal Knowledge Vault, and their Contribution Record which tallies their contributions to the network in the form of achievements, earnings, and qualifications. 

Sahara Data Marketplace: Sahara’s natively built-in decentralized data marketplace is already being used by enterprise clients like MIT, Microsoft, USC, the Motherson Group, and many others to help train their AI models. The marketplace consists of a data toolkit (collection, labeling, QA, etc.), a distribution engine, and a project management tool. We will extend data ops tools for all users, individuals, or businesses, to access. 

Sahara Knowledge Agents: Our Knowledge Agents (KAs) are custom AI programs that operate semi-autonomously. They’re built on large fundamental models but fine-tuned with proprietary data that’s kept private and secure. Users will have access to Privacy and Provenance Toolkits and Knowledge Agent development toolkits, making it easy for developers to create and monetize their KAs.

Knowledge Rebasing: On Sahara, not only can people branch their own AI, they also have the chance to collaborate on evolving AI through a shared ecosystem. Our model-merging toolkits and Knowledge Agent networks can unify multiple decentralized AIs and knowledge. By using these advanced tools, users can create a more comprehensive and interconnected AI experience, fostering an environment where collective intelligence thrives.

Over the coming months, we'll continue to roll out components of our decentralized AI network. This includes Sahara Knowledge Vaults as well as no-code development kits for personal Knowledge Agents and communications between them (Sahara Knowledge Agents Personal and Sahara Protocol). Sahara is building a network where every participant has monetization opportunities, whether it’s collecting/labeling to earn, contributing one’s expertise to build a valuable vault of domain knowledge, selling access to personalized Knowledge Agents, operating nodes, validating transactions, providing compute, or anything else that adds value to the network.

Why We’re The Ones to Do It

Sahara was founded in May 2023 by a team of experts from the AI and web3 industries, and led by Professor Sean Ren and Tyler Zhou. Having earned accolades including Samsung AI Researcher of the Year, MIT TR Innovator under 35, and Forbes 30 Under 30, Sean is a Professor at USC. He has contributed significantly to AI research and innovation. Additionally, Tyler has extensive experience in the blockchain industry as the previous Investment Director at Binance Labs. 

We have the best AI talent, with more than 30 contributors working on Sahara. Our culture is intellectually and geographically diverse, pragmatic, research-driven, and dedicated to delivering the new Age of AI.

Why We’re Called Sahara

Data science has coined many overarching metaphors: there’s digital black gold or the idea of a digital ocean, but to us, the image that called to us the most was that of the Sahara Desert. There’s an obvious resonance between a grain of sand and silicon dioxide in a transistor. We also like the way that an individual grain of sand could represent a tiny nugget of human knowledge and that patterns in the sand, the dunes, the ripples, and irregularities and encrustations could represent the multidimensional complexity of an artificially intelligent model, as could oases or the desert fauna, not to mention the promise of lost cities and hidden dangers and opportunities and the great unknown represented by the world’s largest desert. 

Our Seed Round

We are excited to announce our $6 million seed funding round from last September. The round was led by Polychain Capital with participation from Sequoia Capital, Samsung Next, Matrix Partners, Motherson Group, dao5, Geekcartel, Canonical Crypto, Nomad Capital, Dispersion Capital, Alumni Ventures, Tangent Ventures, Coho Deeptech, and many more.

We plan to use the newly acquired funds to expand our team and enhance our portfolio of AI and blockchain-enabled products. Throughout the year, besides Sahara KA and Data, the network will grow to encompass Sahara Vault, Sahara ID, and Sahara Network for all individuals and businesses to navigate freely in the Sahara ecosystem. 

Find Out More

We hope we’ve whet your appetite for more information about the Sahara Network. Follow us on Twitter here for more updates coming soon.