Frontier Technology Stack

Brace yourselves for the 🗝 crypto-based, 🤖 AI-enabled, 👓 mixed reality-driven startup 💥 BOOM!💥

It’s impossible to take a statement like this seriously. There’s been so much hype around “frontier” technologies like crypto, AI, and AR/VR that namedropping any one is enough to elicit an eye-roll. But stacking all three together? That’s next-level parody, straight out of a Silicon Valley episode.

At first I cracked a joke about it with VC friends on Twitter, proud of my quick wit. But ever since, I’ve been wondering if there’s any truth to it. There’s that saying inspired by Sigmund Freud: “a joke is truth wrapped in a smile”. I’m now convinced it’s all too apt here.

Why?

Real Projects

I’ve come across a bunch of new projects combining frontier technologies in ways that actually make some sense. A few examples that are public include:

• Panda: an AI + AR camera
• RoVR: a super-cuddly AI + AR pet
• Decentraland: a crypto + VR world
• OpenMined: crypto + AI infrastructure

There are yet others that are still in the works. It’ll only become more and more common as these technologies get easier to understand and use.

Next-Generation Stack

It’s not all that surprising these technologies play nicely together when you think about it like a next-generation three-tier application architecture:

• Presentation Tier: immersive and 3D interfaces, enabled by AR/VR
• Logic Tier: intelligent agents that sense, learn, and act, enabled by AI/ML
• Data Tier: decentralized ledgers and state, enabled by crypto/blockchain

These tiers are conceptually designed as abstractions over each other so they are stackable, and that’s exactly what’s starting to happen in these projects.

Note: Admittedly, this oversimplifies the scope of these technologies. I’ll touch more on this below and in future posts, but the point here is just to illustrate one pattern for why and how these seemingly disparate trends come together.

Historical Parallel

All of this reminds me of the early 2000s when, much like now, it was clear a few fundamental trends were underway:

• Cloud → new infrastructure and operational models for large-scale compute, data, networking (Google, AWS)
• Social → new value propositions and usage patterns e.g. friending, status updates, messaging (MySpace, Facebook)
• Mobile → new form factor and primary interface e.g. small display, touch interface, always-on/connected (Blackberry, iPhone)

What was less obvious, at least early on, was how interdependent and mutually reinforcing these trends would become to each others’ success. Mobile both solidified and was turbocharged by the power of the cloud (see: ridesharing / Uber). The cloud also uniquely enabled social, which reached a whole new level combined with mobile (see: messaging / WhatsApp, Snap).

What’s Ahead

So perhaps we’re now at a similar juncture for the frontier technologies we’ve all been watching and waiting on for the past several years. Crypto both incentivizes and protects the sharing of data to advance AI, while AI enables decentralized systems to realize true autonomy. AR/VR relies on AI-based perception and synthesis for immersive experiences, while also providing simulation environments to train AI. Virtual worlds need crypto for asset ownership and transactions, while distributed crypto teams collaborate in VR.

We may just be in for a lot less loling and a lot more wowing from the things people create by stacking mixed reality + AI + crypto. 💥👓🤖🗝💥