Investing in @ambient_xyz I'm excited to announce our investment in Ambient as part of our Crypto Startup Accelerator, to support their mission of building machine intelligence as a currency. Ambient is a useful proof-of-work Layer 1 blockchain that produces AI inference. They're forking Solana and allowing evelopers to build smart contracts that can natively use AI. That's a mouthful, so let's break it down. Traditional proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin deliberately waste energy on hash puzzles whose only purpose is to make cheating expensive. Useful proof of work keeps the same security idea — miners must show they spent scarce computational resources — but points that effort at a task that has value outside the chain. I had personally been very skeptical of useful proof of work after seeing other attempts flounder, but the Ambient team re-ignited my enthusiasm for the idea almost immediately. Other projects have previously proposed "useful" tasks like protein folding, or matrix multiplication. Ambient's task provides AI inference on a single canonical model. Essentially, Ambient is building an open marketplace for AI inference and using its participation as a sybil resistance mechanism for a new L1. Ambient will also serve as a developer platform, allowing anyone to build applications based on their verifiable inference. We envision a vibrant ecosystem of DeFi protocols building capital markets for machine intelligence, and consumer products utilizing inference provided by Ambient. Ambient was started by @iridiumeagle and Max Lang, a dynamic duo well suited to building the future of machine intelligence. Travis has been deep in the decentralized AI trenches, working with Max to preach the gospel of an open market for AI inference. Max is a cracked engineering leader who is helping to realize their vision while focused on shipping. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Ambient, and to support them on their journey forward.

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