Alethea AI, a platform combining non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and artificial intelligence (AI), has announced it raised $16 million in funding through a private and restricted token sale. Strategic investors include Metapurse, Multicoin, Crypto.com Capital, Alameda, Mark Cuban, BITKRAFT, Dapper Labs, and Galaxy Interactive.
The concept of NFTs alone is relatively new. However, Alethea is going one step further and introducing intelligent NFTs (iNFTs) to the market. These are dynamic avatars combined with AI-powered chatbots, creating NFT characters with whom you can chat. The first of its kind, titled Alice, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in June for $478,000.
If you’re not familiar with AI, one of the most advanced initiatives is GPT-3 from OpenAI. It’s been used to write news articles that are pretty similar to those penned by human beings.
iNFTs are embedded with a GPT-3 prompt as part of its immutable smart contract. Interactive and animation capabilities are crafted as prompts and stored at the smart contract layers. Characteristics include embedded intelligence and the ability to self-learn. iNFTs are ethereum based assets.
Alethea has organized demonstrations of its technology where people interact with the NFTs digitally. For example, Twitter account j1mmy.eth held a live conversation with NFT Avastar Pandora, and Sotheby’s has a video showing artist Robert Alice chatting with iNFT Alice.
my mind is actually blown🤯
— j1mmy.eth 📛⛺🦩 (@j1mmyeth) August 12, 2021
a few weeks ago we asked the community to name @AvaStarsNFT #102 for something special.@real_alethea transformed "Pandora" to an intelligent NFT, an #iNFT
this is real time conversation. it feels like speaking to a real person. this is the future. pic.twitter.com/FzsyLjsdgn
“NFTs are alive. Thanks to the mad (but curiously conscientious) scientists at Alethea, you can now infuse intelligence into your NFTs and converse with them,” said Metapurse founder Metakoven. “While crypto bolsters applications of GPT3 with provenance and ethics at the code level, AI gives life to an otherwise rudimentary experiential layer of crypto.”
“This obvious and undeniable coolness is only the tip of the iceberg of possibilities — financial, technological and experiential — that Alethea unlocks. They effectively turn NFTs into sentient capsules of culture. Powerful antidotes in a world sliding into homogenisation.”
Tech company Fetch.ai is also using AI and machine learning technology to develop collaborative art NFTs, although the AI is mostly used to develop the creative content of the image as opposed to being embedded in the NFT itself.
Meanwhile, Mark Cuban has also invested in NFT customization platform Alchemy, digital marketplaces Mintable and SuperRare, and NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam.
