• Today, to claim ownership over an AI/ML model or agent, you ultimately need to depend on an external authority, either a company or a government, to enforce your IP rights and you expect them to do so without bias, in an equitable manner. Merely building it on-chain does not prevent legal labilities.

  At Reppo, we believe e2e provenance and permissionless verifiability should be features, not benefits of building AI on-chain.  It’s it critical that we remove VCs and governments from the AI production lifecycle as much as possible and give power back to builders to co-own and co-monetize their AI IP without permission. Building AI should be a technological right enabled by principles of decentralization.

  A few facts:

• Intelligence remains trapped in walled gardens of corporates who exploit it resulting in misaligned incentive structures for innovation.

• The AI market is controlled by a few players not only on the side of infra i.e. storage, hosting, compute but also by VCs funding AI startups who dictate what is “valuable” to build, companies access gating AI systems and extracting rent from models and agents they claim ownership on to accrue value to the top instead of everyone involved based on their contribution.

• Every web3 DeAI startup trying to fight “the big guys” will eventually become the corporate they set out to challenge because they are too focused on building the best pick and shovels and selling features, instead of benefits. A new collaboration paradigm is needed.

• Massive investments and research in storage and compute, both centralized and decentralized, is taking us to a world where there will be abundant infra.

• 70% of models on HuggingFace have never been downloaded, while 1% of models (primarily developed by big tech companies) account for 99% of downloads.

  Reppo Protocol provides a permissionless, accessible, and cost-effective alternative: Securing the right to build AI that is end-to-end verifiable, privacy preserving, and progressively explainable, without burdening developers and creators about sourcing individual infra resources. For the first-time ever, someone can own and monetize their IP privately, without revealing anything about themselves.

   Technical spec of Reppo Protocol

  We are committed to accelerate the right to build.

This right is simple - We should all be able to access the resources needed to build AI, which goes beyond just the hardware. It also includes the ability to produce and monetize intelligence on our own terms, without a boss. Computational liberty is best achieved via technological, not legal means. (credit: Gensyn)

We are not only in a race for the infrastructure but also in a race for market capture of products and tools that can be built using AI. Who are the main benefactors of all this growth? The VCs and large companies and NOT the developers.

The intelligence network enabled by Reppo is core to achieving builder-owned AI systems that are collectively and independently governed. We strongly believe offloading the responsibility on users to govern AI is wishful thinking. Most users just want to consume. It’s the developers, the dreamers, and the doers who make things happen.

So what happens today if you want to build AI for a living and scale it but don’t want to sell your soul to a VC and meet their expectations of giving back 1000x return?

You have to signup to experience “The Squeeze”.

Because excessive private capital has already corrupted AI production lines and will continuing to fuel centralized AI companies that have mandates of rent-seeking from the data and hardware others contributed to. Handing over our future in the hands of the AI company CEO who may or may not care about your contribution to their IP and share in monetization doesn’t sound very pleasing to us.

Instead, AI developers should be able to co-own and co-monetize the AI they build without an intermediary getting involved, directly with their community. This also means raising directly from their users who benefit in the upside. In exchange, their community should have the ability and tools to know exactly what went into the AI they are consuming and be able to verify who is behind their AI, how the various pieces were connected, and who’s data went into it.

The opposite of the squeeze is often open-source.

Why would you want to close-source your IP and monetize it? “It’s a bad thing. You’re a selfish person.”

Why can’t you monetize open-source?

Because no one would pay for it. Why? Because no one ever asked them to. It’s really that simple.

Proprietary became a dirty word because AI ownership has been solely defined in the bounds of profit-maximizing entities with archaic incentive structures (closed source, rentier capitalism). We live in a world where blockchains are already allowing people to own their data and to freely move their data between applications but why does intelligence remain siloed in walled gardens of large corporates instead of scaling on networks?

We can do better. As stakes get higher with AI advancements, we are at a crossroads -

Accept a future where AI models continue to be owned and monetized in the existing capitalist structure by closed source labs and this becomes the norm or humans who built the model as well as who’s infra and data went into the AI become shareholders in the sovereign AGI we all help create. The choice is ours.

Liberating intelligence

Reppo network enables model developers to become true owners of their IP - owning, governing, and monetizing their intelligence and the downstream products and services their AI powers.

With Reppo, builders can collaborate to co-own and co-monetize models and agents they contribute to and the value flows back to them as well as to the users whose data, hardware, and infra they borrowed, to transform these ingredients to address problems that matter to them, often collaborating with peers who share their values and worldview.

We believe AI systems should be built using distributed governance.

Reppo’s global state that we call ModelRivet allows for each of access to infrastructure without constraints. Further, local states which we call Reppo Pods, are owned by its members rather than a centralized entity and has principles of sovereignty embedded in the technical design.

Reppo’s global state allows infra-builders to who are solving bottlenecks for data, compute, proof generation etc. in a permisionless manner. There is no partnerships team on the Reppo Network that an infra provider will need to talk to. Simply stake to access the Reppo Demand Engine.

Reppo’s local states i.e. the Reppo Pods harness the power of the global state to build domain and intent specific inference engines to address user-needs, while actively contributing to global governance. Pods come together to form “clusters” around common goals such as addressing climate change, progressing BCI, advancing AI security and other areas where AI/ML is actively transforming workflows.

A downstream benefit of this protocol approach is that a crypto network focused on intelligence coordination enables a greater degree of innovation while charging a small tax from every payment is returned to the network, destined to be used to maintain the network itself as directed by community governance.

Path to sovereign AGI

In a post-Reppo world, a developer will not have to think about where their model will be stored, trained, or be hosted, how the server is configured, how many GPUs they need to access for their job, or any other system administration details. They’ll simply define their model architecture and weights and relay their intent on what they want to optimize for to ModelRivet - where the necessary infrastructure and tokenomics will automatically be orchestrated for them.

Developer will also choose to be freelancers and small/medium size business owners, on-chain, contributing to domain-specific Reppo pods instead of being told what to do in exchange for a salary. Many will join pods that matter to them and are aligned with their values and goals. We’ll look back at the current state of AI production and be thankful that there is a way to self-custody and monetize AI models and agents outside of the corporate paradigm.

Reppo network would enable currently gatekept developers to try out new architectures, datasets, and even modalities possible with Crypto X AI - ultimately leading to creation of things that would have otherwise never existed.

As pioneers like Yann LeCun and Francois Chollet have pointed out, Artificial General Intelligence won’t be a single large model that can answer all questions, it will be a living ecosystem of models that can think for themselves, replicate, and one day surpass our understanding.

Reppo is not just challenging the empire state of mind to create AI, but also proposing a new kind of economy where machine intelligence actively benefits from human intelligence and vice versa. We don’t believe we are ready now, or will ever be, to hand over the keys to our destiny to AI systems being built by a handful of people.

Reppo exists to offer pathways where many cultures, ideas, approaches, and opinions can be actively represented in AI systems, by giving voice to those who don’t always shout their concerns, but to whom ownership, sovereignty, and liberation still matter.

How your AI is built and who builds your AI matters.