Qiming Venture Partners investor Frost believes that combining web3 and AI like MyShell has great value.
Written by: Wan Chen
Editor: Zheng Xuan
**Source: **Geek Park
Since OpenAI released GPT Store at its developer conference, this opportunity, which is seen as the App Store in the era of big models, has come into the attention of more people. Chatbot platforms and agent platforms have become one of the hottest entrepreneurial directions in 2024.
But some geeks are no longer satisfied with using Web2.0 or even Web1.0 to shape the application distribution platform in the AI era, and they are eyeing Web3.0.
A startup called MyShell hopes to provide a fair and reasonable mechanism through blockchain to create a prosperous chatbot ecosystem. Under Myshell’s economic mechanism, every participant and contributor can theoretically get their corresponding rewards.
When AI application platforms are flocking to show off the chatbots’ “good at speaking, singing and dancing”, MyShell sees the creators behind the chatbots – people, which sounds very attractive to creators. At the same time, this is also a familiar focus of the web3 startup circle.
Qiming Venture Partners investor Frost believes that combining web3 and AI like MyShell has great value.
On a centralized platform like the Apple Store, it is difficult to allocate app rankings and traffic exposure based on the absolute usage of users, as Apple has its own “butt determines the head”. On the other hand, for example, Hugging Face is relatively neutral, so Meta, Google and other model manufacturers put their models here to contribute. If Hugging Face continues to expand its commercialization in the future, it will also give a relatively fair distribution of benefits.
But the Crypto solution will go a step further. No one owns the platform, and no one has the right to distribute benefits. Instead, users will decide the percentage of benefits distributed to each person based on usage. “If there is a complete third party that records and quantifies everyone’s contribution and then tokenizes it, it is actually very reasonable,” Frost said.
01 Use web3 to build an AI application platform
In March 2023, without any financing, the MyShell team spent three days to create a “simple-looking” Telegram-Bot named Samantha, which can communicate with users through vivid voice.
It was this robot that helped MyShell gain 30,000 users in the first month of its launch, some of whom became MyShell’s earliest financial supporters.
The reason why it attracted attention as soon as it went online was that there were relatively few “multimodal” chatbots at the time, but it lowered the threshold for use and increased usability. For example, many users used MyShell’s chatbot to learn foreign languages.
MyShell’s official website shows an example of a chatbot called Shizuku. “You can have voice and video conversations with her, and she will respond to you with real movements and expressions.”
Starting from a chatbot, the MyShell team gradually developed towards a platform-based direction, attracting users to develop chatbots and publish them on the MyShell platform by providing model tools such as text, voice, and pictures.
Tool components provided by MyShell platform
Open the MyShell official homepage, and users can see various types of published chatbots on the “Explore” page. Through chatting, MyShell is committed to allowing users to “discover the best AI friends or work partners.” On the other hand, users (or creators/developers) can also DIY a chatbot for a specific scenario through the tool components in the “Creation Workshop” and publish it to the platform.
From the product form, MyShell seems to be no different from other chatbot platforms such as Character.ai and Poe. The platform helps creators quickly build and share personalized chatbots through aggregated multimodal AI tools, and users can also use existing chatbots on the platform.
The difference lies in the incentive mechanism for users and developers. On the MyShell platform, people can earn points and incentives by playing bots, and they can also “invest” in creators on the platform and get profit sharing.
Specifically, on the MyShell platform, users and developers can get points rewards by chatting with the chatbots on the MyShell platform or creating new chatbots by themselves. These points can be used to unlock the GPT-4 chat package and $SHELL tokens (50 points = 1 Shell Coin), and the $SHELL tokens are linked to Binance opBNB.
MyShell’s $SHELL token and other mechanism ideas｜Source: World Chain Research
With $SHELL tokens, users can “invest” in chatbots and the creators behind them. By clicking on the “Collect the sponsor badge of your favorite chatbot” action on the page, you can help the corresponding chatbot improve its ranking. When the robot whose sponsor badge “you” have collected generates points rewards, “you” can also get a share of the profits.
In other words, when the “invested” chatbot and its creator appreciate in value, the points held by the user will also increase, which gives the user an incentive to invest in and market the chatbot.
MyShell co-founder Ethan said in a podcast that the MyShell system is also gradually expanding outward. In the future, users who hold points will be able to better participate in the governance of platform content. For example, issues such as which applications should be distributed with traffic, which creators should receive how much funding, and the subsequent use of funds are all planned.
There is no central authority, it is like a project jointly owned and co-founded by users. “For the content governance and creation governance of the entire platform, from creation to distribution, we hope to give these rights back to users and the community. Let everyone make decisions and govern together,” he said.
02 Will the end point of AI be web3?
MyShell co-founder Ethan believes that it is necessary to enter the AI application platform through Web3, because the economic mechanism of Web3 is more in line with the technical characteristics of generative AI with large models as the core:
AI 2.0 makes development simple, and everyone can create an AI application such as a chatbot by dragging and dropping without coding. This will further lead to a huge explosion of AI applications, and accordingly, an efficient economic mechanism is also needed to allocate resources for the surge in AI applications.
At the same time, this Lego-like AI application development process and model has resulted in a significant reduction in the number of people, cycle and start-up capital required for entrepreneurship compared to the pre-AI era, making it difficult for traditional VCs to support it. The economic mechanism of the Myshell platform makes it possible for “users to directly invest in creators.”
In institutional economics, property rights are a prerequisite for business prosperity. MyShell’s decentralized concept provides creators with certain return expectations. Will it stand out among AI application platforms and become an app store in the AI 2.0 era?
According to Worldchain Research, as of November last year, MyShell had more than 100,000 registered users. In comparison, another AI application platform, Poe, already has millions of users. From the perspective of X.com, the main promotion and operation platform of MyShell, MyShell has not attracted widespread discussion and attention. Users and discussions are mainly in the Web3 circle, and have not entered the discussion category of AI application enthusiasts.
In fact, the decentralized form of blockchain is used to allow creators to obtain income openly and fairly without being “exploited” by the platform. This idea was already popular in various projects such as DeFi and GameFi when Web3 became popular in 2022. Now, this concept is applied to AI chatbot platforms.
But the core of this type of problem is not technology or concept.
A creator told Geek Park that blockchain allows creators to earn income fairly and justly on AI application platforms, which is theoretically feasible, but he is not optimistic about its actual progress. He emphasized that “creators are not exploited by the platform, but the platform gives them a living.”
One premise is overlooked here: the huge prerequisite for creators to earn revenue is to have users use it. “Only when users can use it on a large scale will there be opportunities to add new platforms.”
A long-term industry observer believes that without a user base, creators have no possibility of reasonably distributing profits on the platform, and basically no profits. AI application platforms are still in the stage of staking out territory, acquiring customers, and growing. Even the number of active users of GPT Store, Poe, and Character.ai platforms is relatively small, not to mention that the addition of web3 has increased the complexity of using AI application platforms. From this perspective, MyShell is destined to be a small world.
References:
- Myshell Investment Research Report: Binance is actively incubating Web3+AI projects, unlocking the mysterious code of the robot dream factory｜World Chain Investment Research
- Creator platform in the AI native era - MyShell.ai｜Xiaoyuzhou
