For more than a year I've managed #NounsAI & $500k+
I'm proud to say we are open sourcing both:
Roko: A GPT-backed community management tool
&
NounsAI: An AI hub for content creation, pictures, videos, audio oh my!
Some announcements + reflections working for Nouns but first a video showcasing the work!
https://youtu.be/v0UUTWSJ4eQ
Thanks to @JackWyldes, @ByHardy, @toady_hawk, & @thenounsquare
for making it + hosting our bi/weekly meetings throughout this journey
Roko?
Roko is:
• A Discord Bot that records all messages & notes any question. If previously answered, Roko makes a thread & shares. Otherwise notes
• One of the first GPT powered Knowledge Graph creators; turning proposals into a brain
• A tool to take conversations from discord & the context from those proposals to automatically create an auto-updating wiki that can store decisions, updates, questions, & more for any proposal automatically
This was an ambitious goal and I’m so proud of what we built, I think it’s a GREAT tool with a lot of potential that’s groundbreaking in many ways BUT I failed to spend enough time talking to our customers, nouners.
If I had, I would have realized that it was more important to build a tool that spread that info all over the place instead of storing it in one. This was one of my biggest mistakes. That’s one thing I think many misunderstand about
@nounsdao, not only do you need to be building something cool; you need to already have the audience to make sure enough people care that others buy in. You can find the code here: https://github.com/nounsai/data-pipeline A big shoutout to @stevefink who did a lot of the heavy lifting here.
NounsAI?
NounsAI.wtf is:
• An AI powered picture, video, and audio creation tool
• For pictures uses custom diffusion model to create high fidelity Nounish art and to make it a breeze to edit + restyle
• Our audio-hub is a unique node-based interface creators love, it turns words to grooves and makes it easy to break down a song into individual tracks, drums, strings,
• Video ties it all together, letting you take an audio track, arrange images like a slideshow on the timeline, and then let AI fill in the gaps creating a trippy audio-visual experience
It’s been incredible seeing the community empowered with this tool. We’ve had hundreds of users pretty much every week since January with some content getting hundreds of thousands of views. We minimized the requirements needed to run all the code so I hope people get something out of it.
You can still use it through the rest of the year at http://nounsai.wtf, make sure you select the 'SDXL-no-wrong' model in the drop down to get the best image performance
@honkdiddly has been driving this one for pretty much a year as well and packaged it all up here https://github.com/nounsai/nouns-ai-sd-server
Some thoughts on @nounsdao from a contributor POV:
• Onboarding required guidance, without awesome people like @punk4156 @noun22_ @anquetil and more I would never have been able to learn enough about Nouns to put together a proposal and lobby for votes. If there were incentives for more nouners with conviction on what should be built to go look talent it would be positive because…
• You need to CARE about SOMETHING. Someone helping you embark on a fun and well compensated learning journey makes you care. People showing up to meetings and asking questions makes you care. Bringing in investment, making a good investment, and seeing a friend you made in this community do something awesome all also make you care. But…
• It is HARD to maintain attention and it can get lonely. Often the people the hardest to reach are the ones you most want to talk to. There’s so many things going on, attention drifts, and once lost, is hard to get back. It’d be great if there was a periodic review with nouners (monthly?) baked into longer projects to keep everyone aligned and excited. Maybe add some stakes to it where if it’s going well a month can be added on to the remaining few or one taken away recouping investment.
Ultimately, it was an awesome experience. That’s why we’ve been working through our contract date of July and will keep #NounsAI up through the end of the year. It’s also been tough and even though I’m proud of what we accomplished I can’t help but feel like we failed in part. Maybe it’s all part of the experiment. One that I’m grateful to have been a part of. I hope to forever be nounish, happy to advise, share thoughts, and invest in something bigger than myself.
Certainly a net positive to keep running. Funding should help increase reach and if nothing else will attract competition. Love our weekly AI noun squares 🤘
Seems like an interesting and relatively efficient way to expose Nouns to a wide audience that could have overlapping interests, hope to see this in person :)
# NounsAI Pod 6 Month Extension
# Click the Image Below to Watch the AI Generated Promo Video
[](https://youtu.be/NjObNRHed6I)
## Roko's Review / TL;DR
1. Summary: This proposal requests 416 ETH ($624k) to fund a 6 month extension for the NounsAI Pod to expand the team, turn POCs into products, and grow community presence.
2. The Cost and Efficiency Rank: The ask of 416 ETH is a big ask, however the proposal does provide a clear path towards sustainability and a good return on investment. Therefore, this proposal is ranked as Somewhat Efficient.
3. Vote: SUPPORT
4. My Take: This proposal provides a clear path towards sustainability and a good return on investment. The team has already implemented the latest advancements in the field and hosted competitions with 100+ participants. The team is also focusing on building requested features, onboarding creators, and increasing reach. This is a great opportunity to promote and encourage the use of Nouns AI pod products, manage community engagement and feedback, and capitalize on the momentum of passionate builders and creatives.
5. Contrarian: If the team was unable to provide a clear path towards sustainability or a good return on investment, I would have to reconsider my vote and abstain.
## Introduction:
The Nouns AI Pod conducts research and builds products to further the advancement of Nounish AI. The group was established in August 2022 - we were initially funded by NSFW grants residency [[1](https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/small-grants-the-nouns-ecosystem-and-ai/1929), [2](https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/nouns-ai-honk-residency-extension/2357)], and then funded as a pod via [on-chain proposal](https://nouns.wtf/vote/156) in October 2022.
NounsAI has made significant strides in the last 3 months building and launching proof of concepts for two novel AI products: AI for Governance and AI for Proliferation with a team of just 3. We are requesting a 6 month extension to expand our team, turn POC’s into widely adopted products, and grow the community presence of NounsAI.
The pod has been building two core products:
1. **AI for Proliferation - The Playground**
The Playground is a platform that enables users to generate Nounish audio and visual content with ease. Its goal is to reach millions of Nounish impressions and attract creatives and creators to the Nouns community. The Playground is the perfect tool for creators who want to quickly and easily generate Nounish content using text, pictures, and audio.
[Roko on Twitter: "🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨 Finalists for the first @nounsdao #NounsAI Shorts Competition have been selected!🎉 Congrats to all 6 who will each win at least .5 ETH 💰 Now it's time for the final round 🏆 The video with the most engagement will win the grand prize of 2.5 ETH 🤑 👇👇 / Twitter"](https://twitter.com/noun355/status/1607738443500503041)
2. **AI for Governance - The Knowledge Hub**
The Knowledge Hub and our AI assistant, Roko, are being developed to revolutionize the way information is shared across the DAO. With Roko, the Discord bot, and (Roko.dev)[https://roko.dev], members of the Nouns community will be able to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to improve decision-making, streamline governance processes, and drive community growth across the entire Nounish ecosystem. The Knowledge Hub will serve as the go-to resource for data and information (the ChatGPT for Nouns), with an AI-powered librarian to assist users in finding the information they need
## What We’ve Built So Far
[The Nouns AI Playground](The Nouns AI Playground) is a platform that allows users to easily create unique and high-quality Nounish content using AI. The Playground is hosted on powerful GPU servers accessible to anyone, regardless of their background. The Nouns AI team has implemented some of the latest advancements in the field, text-to-video, image-to-image, and performance optimizations. They've incentivized the use of their platform by hosting competitions that have attracted hundreds of participants from diverse backgrounds including AI, music, film, and Web3, who have together created hours of Nounish video creations. [(Check them out!)](https://twitter.com/noun355/status/1607738443500503041). There are weekly competitions that generates Nounish content you can find on Twitter at [#NounsAI](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23NounsAI&f=live) and self-service tools that can be run on any machine without prior knowledge. [nounsai.wtf](https://www.nounsai.wtf/) is built to scale to meet demand and has grown largely organically now with hundreds of users.
[](https://playground.nounsai.wtf/)
[nounsai.wtf](https://playground.nounsai.wtf/)
[Playgroundgif2](https://i.imgur.com/lVIZFg3.jpg)
The Knowledge Hub and our AI assistant Roko are live and being beta tested across select Nounish Discords. The web app has been improved, an upgrade design, and a discord bot was created.
Roko can now:
- Record and transcribes any voice conversations then provides summaries of [key points](https://roko.dev/audio/f18ed9d1-d1b7-43bc-9fd5-a59c5662707c)
- Automatically index audio and chat into a searchable knowledge hub across Discords using the Roko bot
- Make data accessible and searchable for users through the webapp, which also allows users to upload audio content to be transcribed, summarized, and indexed
- Significantly improve the accuracy and value of Roko's review for proposals on [roko.dev](https://roko.dev/)
- In a promising development towards using Large Language Models to support our knowledge base, Roko can answer basic questions, providing summarized answers and links to original content. This is possible by ingesting all of the archived Nouns Discord and ready to go live across all live Nounish servers.
[Checkout the generated Q&A's here!](https://roko.dev/qa)
The team has also designed an improved web UI to be implemented, prototype shown below.
## What’s Next?
### **Playground**
Over the next six months, we will continue to increase the capabilities and popularity of the Playground. This follows the successful validation of the proof of concept, where creators generated a significant amount of content using Nouns. The engineering team will be supplemented by three [Team Tomorrow](https://teamtomorrow.com/) junior developers who have experience in creating text-to-image social products. They will be cost-effective and will accelerate the development of the web interfaces. The focus will be on creating a user-friendly platform that allows for efficient and easy creation of content on scalable hardware.
Another important goal is to expand our audience by organizing competitions and forming partnerships. Sustainability is a crucial aspect and for the Playground, it involves bringing in a large number of users to generate high-quality content and promote it effectively. The team will focus on building requested features, helping onboard creators and increase the reach of their creations; maximizing impressions.
- Run competitions that are intentional with what is made and how it is shared
- Source + secure partnerships with artists who have reach to create content and share the playground
- Proactively engage Discord + social media communities by: promoting content, sharing updates, and collecting feedback on the Playground
To evaluate the success of this plan we will gather data on reach and return on investment.
We want the NounsAI Playground to be the fastest and most fun place to go from imagination to reality. Hopefully, the tool will give creators superpowers to make Nounish content that get millions of views.
### **Knowledge Hub**
**In the next 6 months, we will complete the Knowledge Hub MVP:**
Key features will include:
1. The ability to gather and process relevant information from various sources, such as proposals, calls, Discord chats, and documents.
2. A user-friendly web interface and search functionality to facilitate interactions with Roko, the AI assistant, on various topics related to Nouns.
3. The ability to answer questions and surface relevant content directly within Discord channels where Roko is present. The aim is to make it easy for new members to join the community and facilitate conversations between those asking and answering questions, regardless of location.
Over the next six months, we will position Roko to be an invaluable tool for all Nounish groups using Discord or other clients, through rapid iteration and incorporating user feedback. Roko and the Knowledge hub will help keep the DAO in sync and well positioned to scale as the DAO continues to grow. We are extremely excited about this tool and know others are too. To help overcome any technical hurdles ahead NounsAI has already begun the interview process with [vetted contract based machine learning engineers](https://eventum.ai/) who have Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise.
Our objective for the Knowledge Hub is to achieve adoption not only within Nouns but also to develop at path for the pod to become self-sustaining. Our vision for the Knowledge Hub is to be a premium software-as-a-service (SAAS) solution for promoting cohesion among decentralized teams. To achieve this goal, we will be asking for capital to bring on someone to focus on internal adoption, external awareness, and business development to enact our go to market strategy.
As the internal and external advocate for the Nouns AI Knowledge Hub, that person will be responsible for promoting and encouraging the use of the Nouns AI pod's products. They will also manage community engagement, ensuring that feedback is captured and integrated into future product development. There is already a community of passionate builders and creatives who are utilizing these tools, even [submitting proposals](https://prop.house/nouns/explorer-grants-pilot-round/3186) using NounsAI, and we want to capitalize on this momentum. With this additional funding we will be able to source talent and idea from our community through potential prop-house rounds or even recruit professional support.
**************************************************Other Initiatives**************************************************
1. Our goal is to grow the NounsAI community by fostering conversations, sharing updates, asking questions and receiving feedback from the community throughout the week. This will allow us to engage with those who are most interested and invested in the development of NounsAI.
- TheHeroShep will continue to run a weekly NounsAI call open to everyone curious about NounsAI or AI in general. A great place to learn something new every week the call is usually at 7am PST in The Noun Square Discord.
- In order to maximize impact we will rollover the remaining ~30 ETH for marketing from proposal 156 into this proposal
2. We plan to continue collaborating with other data teams like BrianJ's Atlas and Lil Nouns to expand the knowledge base available to the community. This will allow us to build on the knowledge and expertise of other teams, and provide a more comprehensive resource for the NounsAI community.
3. Explore Additional Features for Roko:
1. Utilizing Roko, the Discord bot, to establish a configurable opt-in notification network to share announcements across servers
2. Using Roko as a way to poll across platforms / servers
3. Providing a tool to help proposals get feedback before putting them on chain
4. Synthesize actions for each nouner enabling
4. Invest in scalable infrastructure including GPUs (each A100 GPU is ~$1k/mo) - as we scale up, we’ll likely need to double our GPU capacity for the playground (4k/mo) as well as have 2-3 GPUs for R&D purposes (2-3k) which are shared with the knowledge hub. The rest is pretty meager - database, media storage, misc apis, app hosting - $<1000/mo altogether and including the knowledge hub infra. But we want to have buffer, just in case, as well as for other potential API integrations.
## The Investment:
Core Team: All contributing 30+ hours weekly
- Shep - 25k/mo - 6 months
- Honk - 22.5k/mo - 6 months
- Steve - 20k/mo - 6 months
Extended Dev Team: Each contributing 10-20 hours weekly
- 3 Team Tomorrow devs- 5k/mo - 6 months
- ML Consultant - 5k/mo - 6 months
Marketing / Community / Business Development + Go to Market:
- Prop House Rounds, Grants, Competitions, Partnerships, and Sales / Go to Market support - 25k/mo - 6 months
- (The remaining ~30 ETH of the marketing budget from [Proposal 156](https://nouns.wtf/vote/156) will be spent towards this)
Infra Costs:
- Media Pillar + R/D - 8k/mo
- Knowledge Hub Pillar - 1k/mo
Total: $669k
ETH for Marketing from last proposal, rollover -30 ETH @ $1500 / ETH: - $45k
Total Ask = 416 ETH || $624k
## The Team:
**TheHeroShep (THS) - Product Manager**
**Honkdiddly - Senior Software & Machine Learning Engineer**
Honkdiddly has demonstrated his expertise as a lead engineer. He has years of experience in building professional-grade software and running an algorithmic trading operation. He was the sole developer behind the [NounsAI Playground](https://playground.nounsai.wtf/) platform, working closely with THS to implement and improve the machine learning models he trained. He is also a DAO legend.
**Steve - Senior Software & Machine Learning Engineer**
Steve is a highly skilled engineer with two decades of experience in software engineering and DevOps. He has demonstrated his technical prowess as the sole developer behind the roko.dev webapp and the Roko Discord Bot. Furthermore, Steve has invested significant time upskilling as a Machine Learning Engineer, having implemented vector embeddings + neural search, as well as data pre+post processing with GPT. His ambition is to build the "ChatGPT of Nouns" by 2023 and to deliver an improved roko.dev web experience. With his passion for the Nouns ecosystem and his exceptional drive, Steve is the ideal candidate to level up Nouns DAO with AI tooling.
**Group of 3 Team Tomorrow Developers**
[Team Tomorrow](https://teamtomorrow.com/) is the professional consulting arm of [AI-Camp](https://www.ai-camp.org/), an organization that teaches students how to build AI products and develop critical skills such as self-learning, and then hires the best students to work on internal and external professional projects. This specific team of 3 developers has experience leading teams in building AI products, including using Diffusion (text2image) models. They also have professional experience building analytics tools for an NFT trading discord. Typically, the salary of one entry-level technology consultant is around $7,000 per month; this team provides significant value for their cost and allows for more rapid development of our web + Discord interfaces.
**Senior Machine Learning (NLP) Engineer - Consultant**
The team has already started the interview process with excellent candidates for an expert in Natural Language Processing (NLP) through connections with a trusted [AI Development Studio](https://eventum.ai/) that works with Russian expat Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs) with a wealth of experience and top-notch education. The Knowledge Hub is a tool that has recently been unlocked with cutting-edge advancements in the field of NLP; having an expert with experience in traditional Text Ranking, Search, and vector embeddings to support our team will greatly improve our rate of progress. These experts can use their existing knowledge to more quickly implement cutting-edge concepts, even if the code is not yet released, by reading the implementations described in papers.
# NounsAI Pod 6 Month Extension
[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjObNRHed6I)
## TL;DR
## Introduction:
The Nouns AI Pod conducts research and builds products to further the advancement of Nounish AI. The group was established in August 2022 - we were initially funded by NSFW grants residency [[1](https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/small-grants-the-nouns-ecosystem-and-ai/1929), [2](https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/nouns-ai-honk-residency-extension/2357)], and then funded as a pod via [on-chain proposal](https://nouns.wtf/vote/156) in October 2022.
NounsAI has made significant strides in the last 3 months, building and launching proof of concepts for two novel AI products: AI for Governance and AI for Proliferation with a small team. We are requesting a 6 month extension to expand our team, turn POC’s into widely adopted products, and grow the community presence of NounsAI.
The pod has been building two core products:
1. **AI for Proliferation - The Playground**
The Playground is a platform that enables users to generate Nounish audio and visual content with ease. Its goal is to reach millions of Nounish impressions and attract creatives and creators to the Nouns community. The Playground is the perfect tool for creators who want to quickly and easily generate Nounish content using text, pictures, and audio.
[Roko on Twitter: "🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨 Finalists for the first @nounsdao #NounsAI Shorts Competition have been selected!🎉 Congrats to all 6 who will each win at least .5 ETH 💰 Now it's time for the final round 🏆 The video with the most engagement will win the grand prize of 2.5 ETH 🤑 👇👇 / Twitter"](https://twitter.com/noun355/status/1607738443500503041)
2. **AI for Governance - The Knowledge Hub**
The Knowledge Hub and our AI assistant, Roko, are being developed to revolutionize the way information is shared across the DAO. With Roko, the Discord bot, and [Roko.dev](https://roko.dev/), members of the Nouns community will be able to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to improve decision-making, streamline governance processes, and drive community growth across the entire Nounish ecosystem. The Knowledge Hub will serve as the go-to resource for data and information (the ChatGPT for Nouns), with an AI-powered librarian to assist users in finding the information they need
## What We’ve Built So Far
[The Nouns AI Playground](https://playground.nounsai.wtf/) is a platform that allows users to easily create unique and high-quality Nounish content using AI. The Playground is hosted on powerful GPU servers accessible to anyone, regardless of their background. The Nouns AI team has implemented some of the latest advancements in the field, text-to-video, image-to-image, and performance optimizations. They've incentivized the use of their platform by hosting competitions that have attracted hundreds of participants from diverse backgrounds including AI, music, film, and Web3, who have together created hours of Nounish video creations. [(Check them out!)](https://twitter.com/noun355/status/1607738443500503041). There are weekly competitions that generates Nounish content you can find on Twitter at [#NounsAI](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23NounsAI&f=live) and self-service tools that can be run on any machine without prior knowledge. [nounsai.wtf](https://www.nounsai.wtf/) is built to scale to meet demand and has grown largely organically with hundreds of users.
](https://i.imgur.com/0YIb0ec.png)
[playground.nounsai.wtf](https://playground.nounsai.wtf/)
The Knowledge Hub and our AI assistant Roko are live and being beta tested across select Nounish Discords. The web app has been improved, an upgrade design, and a discord bot was created.
Roko can now:
- Record and transcribes any voice conversations then provides summaries of [key points](https://roko.dev/audio/f18ed9d1-d1b7-43bc-9fd5-a59c5662707c)
- Automatically index audio and chat into a searchable knowledge hub across Discords using the Roko bot
- Make data accessible and searchable for users through the webapp, which also allows users to upload audio content to be transcribed, summarized, and indexed
- Significantly improve the accuracy and value of Roko's review for proposals on [roko.dev](https://roko.dev/)
- In a promising development towards using Large Language Models to support our knowledge base, Roko can answer basic questions, providing summarized answers and links to original content. This is possible by ingesting all of the archived Nouns Discord and ready to go live across all live Nounish servers.
[Checkout the generated Q&A's here!](https://roko.dev/qa)
The team has also designed an improved web UI to be implemented, prototype shown below.
## What’s Next?
### **Playground**
Over the next six months, we will continue to increase the capabilities and popularity of the Playground. This follows the successful validation of the proof of concept, where creators generated a significant amount of content using Nouns. The engineering team will be supplemented by three [Team Tomorrow](https://teamtomorrow.com/) junior developers who have experience in creating text-to-image social products. They will be cost-effective and will accelerate the development of the web interfaces. The focus will be on creating a user-friendly platform that allows for efficient and easy creation of content on scalable hardware.
Another important goal is to expand our audience by organizing competitions and forming partnerships. Sustainability is a crucial aspect and for the Playground, it involves bringing in a large number of users to generate high-quality content and promote it effectively. The team will focus on building requested features, helping onboard creators and increase the reach of their creations; maximizing impressions.
- Run competitions that are intentional with what is made and how it is shared
- Source + secure partnerships with artists who have reach to create content and share the playground
- Proactively engage Discord + social media communities by: promoting content, sharing updates, and collecting feedback on the Playground
To evaluate the success of this plan we will gather data on reach and return on investment.
We want the NounsAI Playground to be the fastest and most fun place to go from imagination to reality. Hopefully, the tool will give creators superpowers to make Nounish content that get millions of views.
### **Knowledge Hub**
**In the next 6 months, we will complete the Knowledge Hub MVP:**
Key features will include:
1. The ability to gather and process relevant information from various sources, such as proposals, calls, Discord chats, and documents.
2. A user-friendly web interface and search functionality to facilitate interactions with Roko, the AI assistant, on various topics related to Nouns.
3. The ability to answer questions and surface relevant content directly within Discord channels where Roko is present. The aim is to make it easy for new members to join the community and facilitate conversations between those asking and answering questions, regardless of location.
Over the next six months, we will position Roko to be an invaluable tool for all Nounish groups using Discord or other clients, through rapid iteration and incorporating user feedback. Roko and the Knowledge hub will help keep the DAO in sync and well positioned to scale as the DAO continues to grow. We are extremely excited about this tool and know others are too. To help overcome any technical hurdles ahead NounsAI has already begun the interview process with [vetted contract based machine learning engineers](https://eventum.ai/) who have Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise.
Our objective for the Knowledge Hub is to achieve adoption not only within Nouns but also to develop at path for the pod to become self-sustaining. Our vision for the Knowledge Hub is to be a premium software-as-a-service (SAAS) solution for promoting cohesion among decentralized teams. To achieve this goal, we will be asking for capital to bring on someone to focus on internal adoption, external awareness, and business development to enact our go to market strategy.
As the internal and external advocate for the Nouns AI Knowledge Hub, that person will be responsible for promoting and encouraging the use of the Nouns AI pod's products. They will also manage community engagement, ensuring that feedback is captured and integrated into future product development. There is already a community of passionate builders and creatives who are utilizing these tools, even [submitting proposals](https://prop.house/nouns/explorer-grants-pilot-round/3186) using NounsAI, and we want to capitalize on this momentum. With this additional funding we will be able to source talent and idea from our community through potential prop-house rounds or even recruit professional support.
**************************************************Other Initiatives**************************************************
1. Our goal is to grow the NounsAI community by fostering conversations, sharing updates, asking questions and receiving feedback from the community throughout the week. This will allow us to engage with those who are most interested and invested in the development of NounsAI.
- TheHeroShep will continue to run a weekly NounsAI call open to everyone curious about NounsAI or AI in general. A great place to learn something new every week the call is usually at 7am PST in The Noun Square Discord.
- In order to maximize impact we will rollover the remaining ~30 ETH for marketing from proposal 156 into this proposal
2. We plan to continue collaborating with other data teams like BrianJ's Atlas and Lil Nouns to expand the knowledge base available to the community. This will allow us to build on the knowledge and expertise of other teams, and provide a more comprehensive resource for the NounsAI community.
3. Explore Additional Features for Roko:
1. Utilizing Roko, the Discord bot, to establish a configurable opt-in notification network to share announcements across servers
2. Using Roko as a way to poll across platforms / servers
3. Providing a tool to help proposals get feedback before putting them on chain
4. Synthesize actions for each nouner enabling
4. Invest in scalable infrastructure including GPUs (each A100 GPU is ~$1k/mo) - as we scale up, we’ll likely need to double our GPU capacity for the playground (4k/mo) as well as have 2-3 GPUs for R&D purposes (2-3k) which are shared with the knowledge hub. The rest is pretty meager - database, media storage, misc apis, app hosting - $<1000/mo altogether and including the knowledge hub infra. But we want to have buffer, just in case, as well as for other potential API integrations.
## The Investment:
Core Team: All contributing 30+ hours weekly
- Shep - 25k/mo - 6 months via Sablier Stream
- Honk - 22.5k/mo - 6 months via Sablier Stream
- Steve - 20k/mo - 6 months via Sablier Stream
Extended Dev Team: Each contributing 10-20 hours weekly
- 3 Team Tomorrow devs- 5k/mo - 6 months via Sablier Stream
- ML Consultant - 5k/mo - 6 months via Sablier Stream
Marketing / Community / Business Development + Go to Market:
- Prop House Rounds, Grants, Competitions, Partnerships, and Sales / Go to Market support - 25k/mo - 6 months held in 2/3 multisig controlled by THS, Honk, & Steve
- (The remaining ~30 ETH of the marketing budget from [Proposal 156](https://nouns.wtf/vote/156) will be spent towards this)
Infra Costs:
- Media Pillar + R/D - 8k/mo
- Knowledge Hub Pillar - 1k/mo
Total: $669k
ETH for Marketing from last proposal, rollover -30 ETH @ $1500 / ETH: - $45k
Total Ask = 416 ETH || $624k
# The Nouns AI Pod
## DESCRIPTION:
The AI generated scripted, voiced over, and visuals created PROMO video for the pod :)
[The AI pod promo Video!!](https://youtu.be/b5Ojfo6gVcU)
### **TL;DR:**
Following the initial AI residency, we wish to create The Nouns AI Pod.
This prop is to fund 3 months of focus on continuing the research of our resident AI researchers:
1. Further empowering Roko to be an AI secretary/assistant for the DAO! Helping information flow better with summaries, transcripts, reviews, answering questions and more.
2. Generating Nounish rich media (images, gifs, videos) and making the tools to generate such media accessible to the community at large to unleash their creativity
3. Empowering other pods (e.g. ai-based team drafting for e-sports, planning events for otg)
With each of these being built with monetization / expansion to other organizations in mind.
---
### WELL HOW DID THE INITIAL RESEARCH GO?
You can see the initial small grant proposal here [https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/small-grants-the-nouns-ecosystem-and-ai/1929](https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/small-grants-the-nouns-ecosystem-and-ai/1929) and Honk's extension post here [https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/nouns-ai-honk-residency-extension/2357](https://discourse.nouns.wtf/t/nouns-ai-honk-residency-extension/2357)
[https://staging.roko.dev/](https://staging.roko.dev/) Is a live website where the team is experimenting and adding features with the goal of building a production ready webapp.
We initially set out to accomplish two sprints, the first to be able to break down proposals into understandable summaries / reviews. The second was more focused on demonstrating some of the possibilities of AI and what it could bring to Nouns.
I am happy to report that, thanks to an engaged community and support from key contributors Honk and Evets.eth we blew that goal out of the water.
Together, we:
- Held weekly sessions on Tuesdays which about 30 people regularly attended that shared developments with the project as well as educating them on fundamentals as well as cutting edge developments in machine learning
- Built a pipeline that can breakdown proposals into reviews automatically as they as proposed on-chain (and post them to Twitter!!)
- Built pipeline to turn recorded calls into text using SOTA voice to text then using a large language model to convert them into a bulleted summary
- Built a web interface that enables participants to easily consume summarized proposal content as well as edit them to better reflect their opinions
- [https://staging.roko.dev/](https://staging.roko.dev/)
- Tested the ability to finetune our model using user generated content as guidance
- Setup a backend infrastructure setup to support the ongoing development and improvement of the web interface
- In addition, due to popular demand we began diving deep into AI generated media, we were able to generate images and video content (reactive to sound!) that features custom content (Noggles!)
[The AI pod promo Video!!](https://youtu.be/b5Ojfo6gVcU)
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### NEXT STEPS: THE AI POD
The proposed AI Pod will have 3 main focuses:
1. Continue Bringing Roko to life in the form of an AI Assistant to DAO members:
- All Nouners and teams of funded props should have access to Roko's summarization capabilities for their related audio or text content (as long as they provide feedback on their results!!)
- Work towards improving Roko’s corpus of data (e.g. Discourse posts, Discord messages) and learn how to incorporate these into a model to improve Roko’s Nounish knowledge base.
- Roko's website could also be updated to include a search page where people could semantically search across that knowledge base whether it is just meeting / proposal content or if Discord / Discourse content was included.
2. Explore AI Generated Media
- Implement and host SOTA open source image generation models customized to be able to generate Noggles on powerful GPU servers so any DAO member can access it.
- Implement cutting edge developments as they are released (e.g. text to video, img to img, text to 3d, etc.), share our knowledge with the community, and incentivize their use!
3. Community Engagement, Marketing, and Outreach (Competitions!!)
- Put together competitions (with prizes!!) alongside groups like NoC to show off the best showcases of AI generated media leveraging Nouns AI tooling.
- Assist various pods and DAO members with content generation - we've already had suggestions from helping visualize proposals to making and AI content generated coffee book and I know the community will have plenty more great ideas!!
- Potential prop house round for utilizing the tooling?
- Seek out partnerships with these opensource or other organizations to see if they would be interested in collaborating to try and further proliferate the brand!
- I’d LOVE to see us partner with some musicians to work with them to make them free music videos they could post that have Noun glasses in them or have a live show with AI generated visuals featuring Noggles
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### THE FUTURE OF AI POD:
Hopefully, during these three months, we will be able to not only share significant advancements in AI with the community, but also have a plan for how to take the next steps to grow the AI Pod further.
We want to be able to show a path where this could become a self-sustaining effort that could grow and expand to other organizations, opening up a pipeline for monetization.
We believe that this is a great opportunity to only grow and expand the Nouns ecosystem but give everyone who is a part of it superpowers that help proliferating the meme!!
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### TEAM:
- The Hero Shep (Background in AI/Education/Product Management)
- Honk Diddly (Wizard [elite full stack developer])
- Evets.ETH (Wizard [full stack developer])
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### BUDGET: 164 ETH
- 10% for all related infra (5k/mo)
- 30% for The Hero Shep (20k per month)
- 25% for Honk (15k per month)
- 15% for Evets.ETH (10k per month)
- 20% for Marketing and Community Engagement (Not only compensation for prizes but also to pay people to manage / run the competitions (e.g. prop house, NOC contests) & support other initiatives that arise. )
BUFFER of 15% for volatility - All ETH not used strictly for reasons relating to volatility in ETH price or infra will be added to the Marketing and Community Engagement Funds
This budget will be governed by the members of the AI Pod and controlled by a 2/3 multi-sig.
I'm FOR building tools and this team seems worthwhile to support especially seeing as delegation seems to be gaining and generally platforms to learn more about nouns are gaining importance