I’ve spent my career chasing one question: How do we gather the right data to make AI work in the real world? From Stanford labs to UT Austin classrooms, I searched everywhere. The answer isn’t another AI lab, but a blockchain built to treat data as IP. That’s why I am joining @StoryProtocol as their Chief AI Officer. At Stanford, I studied “cloud robotics,” how fleets of robots could use distributed compute to learn together. I even mounted a dashcam in my car to solve this: If robots could only upload 5–10% of what they see, how do we pick the most valuable data? Most of it was boring freeway footage. But <1% captured rare scenes: self-driving Waymos, construction sites, unpredictable humans. That “long-tail” data made models smarter. I hand-labeled it, even paid Google Cloud’s labeling service to annotate my footage with niche concepts like “LIDAR unit” and “autonomous vehicle”, and trained models that ran on a USB-sized TPU. But academia only goes so far. At UT Austin, my questions shifted: → How do we crowdsource rare data to improve ML? → What incentive systems actually work? That pulled me into crypto – blockchains, token economies, even DePIN. I blogged, wrote papers on decentralized ML, but still wondered: who’s actually building this infrastructure? By total chance, I met the Story team. I was invited to give a talk at their Palo Alto office. It was 6PM, room still packed. I rambled about “Neuro-Symbolic AI” and ended with a slide called “A Dash of Crypto.” That talk turned into an advisory role, which now turned into something much bigger. We’re at a pivotal moment. Compute is mostly solved. Model architectures are copied overnight. The real moat is data. Not scraped Reddit. Not endless language. But rights-cleared, long-tail, real-world data that trains embodied AI – robots, AVs, systems that navigate our messy world. Imagine this: I capture a rare driving scene on dashcam & register it on Story. A friend labels it. An AI agent creates synthetic variants. On Story’s graph-structured chain, each becomes linked IP. Royalties flow back automatically. Everyone gets paid, every step traceable on-chain. That’s why I’m now Chief AI Officer at Story building the rails for decentralized, IP-cleared training data. It’s time to make data the new IP. Story is the place to do it. Much more to come soon. Let’s go.