Lenia DAO purpose
TL;DR
We want to provide a new economically viable way of doing open research. To that end, we are building a decentralized and transparent research lab.
Why now? We believe that all the tools emerging in the crypto ecosystems allows new kind of decentralized business models and help fight against the tragedy of the commons plaguing open source work and science.
Volunteers are welcome! If you want to know how you can help, jump to the end of the article!
This vision is not set in stone and you can find the official document tracking it in our Wiki: https://github.com/stockmouton/lenia.world/wiki/Purpose
Vision
- Provide a new economically viable way of doing open research in ML
Why though?
AI research has never seen such an influx of capital than those past few years so why try to find a new way to fund those research?
Even though most AI research is published transparently on platforms such as Arxiv, the community has been fighting for years to ensure reproducibility and transparency, being perfectly aware that AI research’s own such tremendous potentials that doing it behind closed doors is not an option. Especially if one wants to democratize its use while keeping ethics in check.
OpenAI was among the first to embrace this vision while seeing that the first bottleneck of AI research was engineering. Maybe they came too early but their need for funding across the board (salaries, computing power, etc.) attracted investors and my guess is that the trap has closed on them: they had to go back on a business model behind closed doors. This is the price of speed.
Hopefully, the field still contains startups and initiatives that are pushing the envelope forward! Trying to be as transparent as possible while solving the engineering bottleneck and having investors at the same time. But as for-profit companies, the same risk lies upon them. How long will their business model be sustainable before having to bend to economic necessities and start closing their doors too in the name of competitiveness?
My hope is that they succeed, but can we create a research organization that does not suffer those risks?
We believe the emerging web3/Defi tools (you name it) allow new incentives to be built to foster a decentralized and transparent research community from the ground up. By providing a sustainable path towards a decentralized self-funding research lab, we also see ourselves as orthogonal to companies in general, hopefully providing a missing piece to the ecosystem.
Mission
- Become the first decentralized, autonomous, and transparent ML (Machine Learning) Research Lab
Core Values
- We believe that research should not be controlled by a corporate/state entity but on the contrary, be openly transparent.
- We believe this ambition is aligned with the capacity to properly compensate researchers for their work.
- We believe that a DAO being at the intersection of crypto and ML can give us enough collective power to help solve some of the most important problems in the field and beyond.
- We believe that radical transparency through a democratic process and open tooling is a necessity to succeed.
- We will proactively prevent research that we perceive to be unethical.
Strategies
- Fund open research initiatives with an ulterior economic incentive allowed by blockchain technology
- Reward the Lenia DAO members for their economical support and concrete involvement in order to foster a strong community around us
- Develop the Lenia brand to raise awareness about the project and grow the community
Goals
Strategy #1: Fund open research initiatives
- Gather a ML creator community around our values and help them produce visual/audio/??? collections from their research and artistic work.
- Fund researchers in the broader cellular automata community, which could help the discovery of new underlying rule systems, proof of mathematical properties, etc. Each of those examples could be sold as NFT to reward researchers.
- Provide world-class blockchain tooling for ML researchers/artists to ease publishing and monetizing their work. As tools are always one of the limiting factors in research, we believe the blockchain provides new tools to solve the publishing business model crisis while making it de-facto open, transparent, and robust to censorship.
Strategy #2: Align incentives of Lenia DAO members with the overall project
- Reward for their economical support and concrete involvement in order to foster a strong community around us
- Produce brand derivatives (merchandising, etc.) at a very low fee for the different NFT collections holders.
- Track involvement of the most active DAO members with any possible means (POAP, Snapshot, transactions, etc.) and use them as gateways to exclusive perks
- Build an ecosystem (including innovating tokenomics) to provide values for members.
Strategy #3: Develop the Lenia brand to raise awareness about the project
- Appeal to the ML community of researchers through evangelization and education (blog and in-person interventions).
- Develop stylish merchandising to appeal to a larger audience
- Make Lenia an integral part of the metaverse(s) by making it more composable and integrable (in 3D environments for example).
- Make the DAO take part in open research initiatives outside of our direct scope
- Develop a consistent and recognizable tone through social media communication
Join us!
The path forward is not easy and creating any financially self-sustained organization requires a lot of work. We need more partnership than ever with anyone who thinks can help us achieve our goals!
The beauty of web3 is that everyone can share the success of projects from the start. So if you are researchers and/or artists, web and/or crypto developers, community managers, or just excited about the project, let’s have fun and join us!
If you are in a company and be interested in doing a partnership to fund open science research, reach out!
Thanks for reading this far, have a nice day, readers! 🙏
