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Qubic is redefining blockchain and AI by directing mining power toward training Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) through its innovative Useful Proof of Work (uPoW) and Quorum protocol. With its ambitious goal of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2027, Qubic has recently reached a major milestone: identifying promising ANN architectures that bring it closer to simulating human brain processes.
Today, we speak with David Vivancos, a seasoned AI scientist at Qubic, to learn more about this breakthrough, Qubic’s unique technologies, and the future of blockchain and AI.
David Vivancos is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientist at Qubic, responsible for advising Qubic in their journey to developing AI and achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). David has been working in tech since 1995, starting with developing some of the internet’s first web2 companies before moving to web3 over a decade ago. In addition to advising Qubic, David is also the CEO at MindBigData where he created groundbreaking datasets like MNIST-8B for brain signals, showcasing his commitment to advancing AI through data-driven methodologies. David has also authored a number of books and research papers.
Q. Can you tell us more about your role at Qubic and how your background in AI has shaped its vision?
I am proudly advising Qubic in Science together with Jose Sanchez a renowned neuroscientist, and my role is providing guidance, recommendations in what AI can bring to Qubic in several dimensions, always from the edge of AI research, and also documenting and presenting the current status of AI initiatives in Qubic, mainly the journey towards Aigarth or the True AGI initiative being built by Qubic founder CFB, I have been in the AI field researching AGI for decades and also building real AIs so surely my journey and vision is shared and can help advance faster the Qubic vision too.
Q. What inspired Qubic to combine blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence, particularly with a focus on AGI?
I think is the logical evolutionary path, the blockchain world in general and crypto in particular have always being the targets of criticism due to waste in compute and energy, curiously the two the missing pieces in the road towards building a real AGI from the beginning, I called it the sword of Damocles of AI ventures a few years ago, and still valid argument, so here Qubic nailed the need with the potential solution.
Q. Could you elaborate on the recent milestone of identifying promising candidate architectures for ANNs? How does this contribute to achieving AGI by 2027?
Since there are no AGI’s yet, we need to find ways to get closer to it, and the Qubic path involves using a biological approach to it instead of humanly designing what mathematically intelligence is, something that btw we don’t know exactly what it is, so it is a conjecture, in this regard the first years of AiGarth finished in December 2024 were devoted to create the building blocks of a self-discovered set of candidate neural distributions and architectures that showed potential, enabling the current phase where they are tuned further and specialised. It is like if you have an infinite set of lego pieces and you need to test the ones that fit to start building your bigger structure.
Q. What are the key challenges in simulating human brain processes, and how is Qubic addressing them?
The main one is that we don’t know much about the brain, but the little that we know is in the Qubic principles, so the idea in Qubic is that either the rest of the unknowns are learned in the journey, or implemented if something new is discovered in the science literature, that’s our mission too to advise the Qubic development team of what new pieces of knowledge have been discovered in other branches of science that can help steer Aigarth, then CFB will decide if they will be implemented or not.
Q. Qubic utilizes the unique Quorum protocol. How does this set it apart from traditional consensus mechanisms like PoW or PoS?
Because it replaces traditional mining in the crypto world at large, with AI-focused computation through 676 Computors. Unlike PoW/PoS, it achieves consensus when 451 Computors agree as a safeguard to avoid tampering with the results and extra safety mechanism or “Byzantine” Fault Tolerant quorum-based system with sub-second transaction finality to achieve it fast.
Q. With feeless transactions and the ability to combine smart contracts and oracles, how do you see Qubic impacting industries like DeFi, NFTs, or supply chain management?
Because it enables low-cost, high-frequency operations, also can be used to create and serve dynamic NFTs fast linked to real-world events for example, and improve automated supply chain processes with real-time tracking at minimum cost compared to other alternatives
Q. Qubic's uPoW model focuses on training ANNs rather than traditional mining. How does this approach mitigate environmental concerns while ensuring network security?
For humanity to keep evolving, we need more technology and more energy it is a fact, the Kardashev scale shows it clearly, if we stop it, our civilization will collapse, and if we do it wrong maybe too, current AI data centers are power hunger and a environmental hurdle, that could be solved with better technologies, meanwhile the decentralized Qubic approach that uses that energy and compute with a useful purpose can solve many of these issues, and security is a matter of the protocols used.
Q. How do miners and computors collaborate in the Qubic ecosystem? What incentivizes miners to support AI training without direct payment?
They are already part of the system, when they mine, they do use part of the compute for AIgarth, so the better solutions they mine,the better payment they have, so it is directly related, computors at a higher rate than regular miners, but all help and earn, once Aigarth is deployed they will much more, since the AI executions of useful stuff will be done there and paid with Qubics.
Q. What advancements can we expect from Qubic in the next few years as it works toward AGI?
The main one is an alternative approach to current transformers and “old” Large Language or Vision models, that populate most of the AI efforts, we should stay tuned to the Aigarth progress once we have metrics that we can really compare with other techniques, and it will be documented in the follow up revision of the scientific paper published on December 24th 2024, currently already close to 10000 reads in just a few weeks something out of the ordinary in the scientific world.
Q. How does Qubic plan to address interoperability challenges to integrate with popular EVM wallets like MetaMask?
Our MetaMask Snap for Qubic is fully developed and awaiting final approval from MetaMask. WalletConnect is also nearing completion, currently in a similar stage. Additionally, we’re integrating Ledger for enhanced hardware wallet support. To further expand interoperability, we’ve implemented the Vottun Bridge, enabling seamless cross-chain asset transfers and liquidity sharing across Ethereum and Arbitrum networks. Additionally, we’re working on integrating LayerZero and expanding support for other hardware wallets to further extend our ecosystem’s capabilities
Q. How do you see Qubic's approach to AGI reshaping industries beyond blockchain, such as healthcare, education, or robotics?
It will be cross industry, to everyone of them, not in the current state of course, but once AGI is achieved or even maybe earlier depending on how the computing resources are distributed, since Aigarth is foreseen to compute any task a human brain could but better and faster, so it will multiply the output in all industries solving age old problems, for that the more compute through miners that is drawn to Qubic the faster it will be achieved and the Qubics will be used as coin to access the Aigarth AGI is like owning fuel the AGI neurons of the future.
Q. What ethical considerations does Qubic take into account in its pursuit of AGI?
The transparency of the Open Source development and the Quorum mechanism is the safeguard that it is built for the good of all, as long as they want to take part on it’s development, but AGI or E-AGI as I call it since it will be embodied, will at some point be beyond human control, but until be get there, it can be guided to be as less biased as possible, for that the more people onboard the better, the journey is just beginning and the time to get involved is now.This is why my point of view is that Qubic should be decoupled from the periodic waves of the cryptoworld, this is not Bitcoin this is a potential pillar of the next step in human evolution.
David Vivancos
