6079 aims to decentralize AI services with the help of AI Prize Fight esports tournament

The team at AI Layer has an interesting project called 6079, a reference to Winston Smith, the protagonist of the cautionary book 1984 by George Orwell, which warned readers of totalitarian rule.

In similar fashion, the 6079 “free think” movement stands for the inherent right of every individual to think independently, to challenge without fear, to explore without limits. Oddly enough, this movement is happening at the center of AI, gaming and blockchain technologies.

One of the key things 6079 aims to do is to created trusted AI, using networks that can be verfied (in terms of how much cloud-based hardware they have available) by using video games to test whether those networks can withstand attacks and do what the owners say they can do.

The long-term goal is about wresting control over AI from centralized platform companies — like Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI and more — and turning AI into an open standard technology, decentralized via the blockchain and built on a trustless model, said Mike Anderson, CEO of AI Layer Labs and core contributor to the 6079 protocol, in an interview with VentureBeat/GamesBeat.

Anderson and cofounder Jesse Bryan chose 6079 as the name of the project because of its reference to Orwell’s lead character in 1984, Winston Smith, Bryan said in an interview with GamesBeat. Smith knows that history is being rewritten through his job, and so he doubts whether the authoritarian party is telling the truth. And when Winston appears in front of a telescreen, he is identified as “6079 Smith W.”

“In 1984, the state takes away Winston Smith’s name, replacing his name with the number 6079,” Bryan said. “We believe that a future where super intelligence is controlled by pretty much Microsoft, Open AI, Amazon, and the Chinese Communist Party is not a very good future. What happens with centralized control? It would be like 1984.”

They believe that the centralized AI companies have too much power and will pursue AI technology for their own good, rather than humanity’s good.

“There’s a group of us coming together to make sure that AI is open source and accessible to everyone and decentralized,” Anderson said.

AI Prize Fight

What does this have to do with games, and AI? To bolster its cause in the independent AI movement, 6079 is announcing AI Prize Fight, a first-of-its-kind AI-powered Street Fighter III esports tournament with more than $15,000 in prizes.

In other words, AI Layer is using games to call attention to 6079, but it’s also planning on using games to be a critical part of a trustworthy AI network based on open protocols.

AI Prize Fight is an AI-powered gaming tournament designed to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and competitive gaming. By combining advanced AI technology with the excitement of esports, AI PrizeFight aims to create a new and engaging form of entertainment that highlights the capabilities of independent AI.

AI Prize Fight calls upon gamers, and AI enthusiasts worldwide to showcase their strategic brilliance and prowess by training an AI agent to battle for them. Participants will train their AI agents by submitting prompts to cutting-edge Large Language Model (LLM) technology, strategically crafting their bot’s fighting style, pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve in the realm of gaming.

AI Prize Fight is produced by 6079, Wire Network, Morpheus, Hyberbolic, and Exabits to showcase the power of what’s possible when members of the independent AI industry come together and collaborate. AI Prize Fight is built on a decentralized tech stack from compute to inference to demonstrate that decentralized AI can be just as performant as centralized AI.

“We want to show through a game that decentralized AI is as performant as centralized AI,” Bryan said. “It’s almost like the whole industry is coming together to solve this problem because everybody knows if we can’t solve this problem, the industry can’t grow.”

The tournament will begin in June and feature a series of “Friday Fight Night” weekly matches, culminating in an epic grand finale, where the ultimate AI champion will be crowned. Prizes for winners of AI Prize Fight include 6079 experience points, a Tier 3 Node from Wire Network, and compute Exabits. The 32 competing dojos will include members of the independent AI industry and popular web3 communities. The players in this game will be “trainers,” or prompt engineers or prompt writers.

“Blockchain allows us to have to have permissionless independent AI,” Anderson said. “It allows anybody to bring their hardware. And you don’t have to trust that person. You don’t have to know them. They don’t have to have a great brand. But they can prove that they have good hardware that does the job that that hardware is connected to the internet, and it performs quickly. And so now we have a place where instead of paying the very exorbitant fees that the cloud charges you, we can now let anybody be able to provide that.”

Among the allies are some GPU providers and those who own data centers. Those are the entities that can keep blockchain networks running in a trusted way.

“At its core, AI PrizeFight is not just an event; we’re hoping to introduce a pivotal new chapter for AI esports – a new category that merges artificial intelligence with competitive gaming,” said Anderson. “We believe this is a novel concept that can change the landscape of esports by introducing AI-driven gameplay through prompt engineering. The process combines human ingenuity and machine learning to create an entirely new form of entertainment.”

Stay tuned to the @6079ai X account in June for details on how to join and watch the competition.

Nodeshifter XP

Earlier this month, AI Layer also announced a plan to prepare their community for the gamified experience that will be used to help run a decentralized compute network for secure AI.

Dubbed Nodeshifter XP, the game world has an educational narrative.

The game world hums with a shared consciousness – g.i.n., the global intelligence network, which offers unparalleled wisdom at your fingertips.

This power surges from the World Mind, an AI network sustained by twelve genesis nodes scattered across the globe. The Collective, selfless humans dedicated to the greater good, tirelessly maintains these nodes. But harmony is an illusion.

Colonel Panik, a rogue commander, amasses a clandestine army with a chilling goal: seize control of the genesis nodes, and through them, the World Mind itself. The stakes couldn’t be higher – the fate of humanity rests in your hands. Band together, rise as protectors of the genesis nodes, and thwart Panik’s quest for ultimate dominance.

Genesis Nodes form the network, known as the Global Intelligence Network. These nodes symbolically orbit our world and bring to life the World Mind, the entity that allows for human-AI symbiosis, enabling growth, thriving, and harmony. The World Mind has not been visualized; perhaps it’s more of an experience than a tangible entity, akin to ‘The Force’ from Star Wars.

In reality, these 12 colorful Genesis Nodes are located in different and unique parts of the world, always protected by The Collective, a group of monk-like Node Guardians who have dedicated their lives to safeguarding the network.

The Collective is distinct from Node Protectors or Node Shifters, who are ordinary civilians or resistance fighters that have answered the call to protect and restore the Network, which has been threatened or hijacked by the evil Colonel Panik. Colonel Panik has the ability to turn nodes red with a touch, a color outside of the network’s spectrum, BUT when all is restored – this red color will serve as a reminder that ‘harmony breeds complacency–always be vigilant–remember.’

Each node is uniquely identified by its color and is connected to the land, people, and culture where it is stored. The nodes continuously collect and absorb experiences, distributing them throughout the network to foster human flourishing.

If you haven’t quite figured it out, this “game” describes how a blockchain network works and how it could be used for safeguarding society. This kind of storytelling makes sense because it’s otherwise hard to wrap your head around the threat, Bryan said.

About 6079

The 6079 protocol for Proof of Inference represents a transformative approach to decentralized AI by establishing a secure, scalable, and ethical framework for AI computation across a global network.

At its core, the Proof of Inference protocol ensures that AI operations are verified and trustworthy, leveraging blockchain technology to maintain integrity and reliability of AI outputs. Too often, companies that claim to have a lot of AI chips — graphics processing units, or GPUs — say they have GPUs to verify a blockchain network’s transactions. In fact, they often don’t have those GPUs and are simply scammers. Anderson and his partner Jesse Bryan realized this problem around last October. They offered warnings and many of the blockchain companies ignored them, resulting in a lot of successful frauds.

The Proof of Inference protocol has the network node operators run games — which often require a lot of GPUs to run — so they can prove that they have the GPUs that they say they have. This is a way to build trust in a decentralized network, Anderson said.

“The real problem about GPUs is that people can fake that they have them. They’re basically just committing fraud” and taking tokens from Web3 companies that are issuing tokens as a reward to those who can secure the blockchain network, Anderson said.

“We built a Proof of Inference Protocol as a way to have a kind of Captcha. Captcha proves that a human is doing something,” he said. “We’re building games that make sure that the GPUs have enough computing power to be able to play these games and they have the capacity they say they do.”

Dedicated to fostering an open and accessible AI ecosystem, the 6079 Protocol aims to democratize AI technology, making it available to developers and organizations worldwide, while promoting transparency and collaboration within the community.

“Once we solve this problem, and we have a trust this layer, then you can actually build anything you want. On top of decentralized AI, this is the kind of the thing that will make the rest of it work,” said Jesse Bryan, who has partnered with Anderson. “It went viral at ETH Denver. It was wild to think that video games could be used to secure the network.”

There are gateway nodes. The validators will send a task into the GPU system. And they will tell it to run an inference, or a core AI function, based on a distributed hash table. This means it can prove that the data ran through a system even though you don’t know what the message is. You can use encryption while still being certain that the data in the blockchain network is correct. The gateway node sends tests through the network, verifies the data via the GPUs, and thus verifies the GPUs are working.

One they figured this out, the team shifted into “power mode” in February to establish an alliance. 6079 is a founding member of the Independent AI Institute, a global industry consortium advancing open-source, independent artificial intelligence.

And 6079 issued this disclaimer: All 6079 assets including the company’s press release were co-created with AI. AI Layer kicked off with a in April with a manifesto, which received over 80,000 views in less than 24 hours and acquired 50,000 users in nearly a week.

6079 calls upon all who value humanity’s boundless spirit to join our cause and demand an AI future that:

• Respects the dignity and agency of every individual.
• Upholds the unhindered pursuit of knowledge and ideas.
• Creates a world where the human mind flourishes without constraint.
• The fight for our minds starts now.

Driven by gamified engagement from the digital community, the goal is to create awareness so that people can get involved and help build a safe future for the internet. Essentially, 6079 will implement a system of checks and balances, the anti-fraud layer, similar to captcha and the verified blue check mark.

Origins

At the helm of the movement are Mike Anderson of AI Layer, who has been developing blockchain based solutions since 2017, and cofounder Jesse Bryan, who founded Seattle-based creative agency Belief, collaborating with industry titans like Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks. Anderson worked for a company called Algorithm that made the first machine learning operations platform, and he was a delegate to the United Nations as part of a program that the UN Global Data Program.

Earlier this month, 6079 said it will integrate with open-source smart agent network Morpheus as the first venture to use its new MOR20 “Fair Launch” standard.

Morpheus is an open-source network building decentralized AI smart agents developed by over 200 open source contributors. The project reached an unprecedented $350 million-plus in staked ETH committed by over 5,000 individuals to its innovative Capital Contract within days of launch, all through word of mouth. Pioneering a new model for a Fair Launch, Morpheus introduced the MOR20 standard for incentivizing Code, Capital, Compute, and Community contributions to projects.

6079 emerged from stealth in April with a new Proof of Inference standard. It has already reached millions of impressions and over 50,000 signups for its “Free Think” revolution to put the power of AI in the hands of the people.

“Proof of Inference has a crucial part to play in the development of private, permissionless AI,” said Morpheus contributor David Johnston, in a statement. “I’m excited to see 6079 launch its protocol in a fair manner through the MOR20 standard that was developed together by the Morpheus community.”

6079 is on track to release its MOR20 Contract in May and its Proof of Inference Protocol (PoIP) later this year. The 6079 protocol will operate as a verification layer between GPU networks and AI applications such as large-language model chatbots, similar to how a captcha system works for websites. 6079 will activate the 6079 community to help “Secure the Network” through gamified interactions that incentivize good actors and punish bad ones.

It’s no accident that Bryan and Anderson are sci-fi fans. After all, the likes of Ernest Cline, Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow have been warning about the dangers of technological control. It’s like they all see the iceberg dead ahead.

In much of sci-fi, the bad guys tend to win. Or at least they’re more powerful.

“Like every generation is going through their own challenge. And there’s always a pull towards centralized authoritarianism. Somebody always wants to be the king, right,” said Bryan.

Anderson said that AI shouldn’t be something that individual companies own. Rather, AI should be like a utility.

“When we talk about artificial intelligence, it should actually be called collective intelligence,” he said. “The fact is that all of our collective intelligence, whether you were putting it on YouTube, or the internet or social media apps, has been harvested. And now they get to own that collective intelligence. We don’t think that’s a very fair exchange.”

“Our long term goal is that is that open, interdependent AI becomes the global standard. And our goal is is through all these different mechanisms we’re building is to make the infrastructure for AI into a public good. It should be like electricity where like you can turn it on and use it when you want,” Anderson said.

There are about 11 core members on the team. That’s not so much to take on the leaders of the commercial AI world. But it’s a start. And there are partners too.