Partnership announcement: Nevermined and Algovera join forces

We’re very excited to announce that Nevermined and Algovera have entered a strategic partnership aiming to help developers monetize their AI services through Nevermined’s innovative technology, Smart Subscriptions. 

Algovera and Nevermined have been working together since the launch of the Nevermined Marketplace App, when Algovera chose the Nevermined App to publish their AI services and share them with their users under a Smart Subscription plan.  Richard was so impressed with the product as well as our vision that he agreed to be a Nevermined advocate with one clear mission: convince the AI ecosystem of the value that Nevermined can bring to the community. 

 

We managed to drag him away from Discord and ChatGPT to ask him a few friendly questions. 

So, who is Richard Blythman?

RB: I’m a machine learning engineer with experience in big tech, universities and AI startups. I’m the co-founder of Algovera, a project developing a platform to build and deploy LLM apps (such as workflows, assistants and agents). 

I’m also one of the people behind Augment, a series of hackathons around Decentralized AI. We organized one at EthCC in Paris recently and that’s where I spent some quality time, exchanging thoughts with Don and Aitor from Nevermined. We gelled, we had a lot of things in common. The rest is history…

What makes you excited about AI? What gets you out of bed?

RB: There’s been a big paradigm shift in AI recently. And I think it’s hard to underestimate the impact this can have, on all kinds of industries and business. Because it turns out that certain new abilities emerge in language models above a certain size, such as in-context learning (a new mode of learning that doesn’t require updating the weights). Plus, these LLMs have gotten better at generalization, and complex reasoning. This makes it much easier to quickly build and deploy apps on top of LLMs. And that’s unlocked a stream of creativity in the AI community, which is super exciting. 

As an AI expert with strong connections in the industry, what do you see as the current problems with AI? What are devs worried about?

RB: As developers, there isn’t a huge amount of choice in the AI platforms that we use. For example, nearly everyone uses GitHub and there aren’t really any competitors to HuggingFace. It looks like OpenAI will be dominant as a platform for LLM apps. However, it’s looking like they’re not all that open, despite the name. And we all know what happened with the monopolistic practices of previous generations of app stores. AI is a very important tech and monolithic companies and business moat models will not be beneficial for its development. 

You’re passionate about the decentralization of AI, irrespective of the technology. So what is it that excites you about the Nevermined stack?

RB: The infrastructure that Nevermined is building is shaping up to be the marketplace or even the AI app store that the ecosystem truly needs: open and decentralized. It puts control back in the hands of the creators, and helps them to monetize their creations.

What’s special about Nevermined is that it can help AI devs in two ways. 

On the one hand, I like how easy it is to use it with ML services, APIs etc.  The Smart Subscription feature allows devs to create time-restricted access to their models or agents, no matter how complex they are. They could have many endpoints or include different data assets; with Nevermined you wrap them all into one asset, with one access token. That’s super useful. It makes it really easy to publish LLM apps such as workflows, assistants and agents. You can even monetize a ChatGPT plugin with Nevermined.

And turning it up a notch: AI devs will also get access to a data market. Which means they will be able to train or finetune models on relevant data that has access control. So they know that they didn’t infringe any copyright and they can even create reward or royalties schemes for data contributors. 

Even though I’m not messianistic about one tech or another, I like how Nevermined uses some fundamentals of blockchain, like NFT-tokenization and programmable payments, to address those issues of access, attribution and payment. 

What exactly will you be doing for Nevermined?

RB: In the last few months, me and the Algovera team have been working with Nevermined to prototype, deploy and publish LLM apps that are composed of modular functions and plugins. We’ll continue to build more of these. 

And above that, I will be actively reaching out to different AI communities, with one clear message: “I’d love AI devs to onboard the Nevermined marketplace. Because I’m convinced it can help them with 3 things: 

• Keep control over their AI models, agents and apps. 
• Monetize their work. 
• Get access to an increasing number of datasets for training purposes. 

If you want to reach out to Richard, join our Discord or drop him an email at richard@nevermined.io.