As it so happens, I’m heading to my stepmother’s birthday and a family gathering in the San Francisco Bay Area next weekend. Out of curiosity I looked around for other things going on at the same time that I might be able to drop in on, thinking maybe my wife and I could drop by a festival or show or art event. Then I noticed that the annual conference for the NEAR Protocol happened to be at Fort Mason the Monday & Tuesday after. I’m a longtime fan of their approach, which is one of the smartest ones out there. No surprise, as NEAR was cofounded by Illia Polosukhin), one of the authors of the original paper that launched the LLM phase of AI: Attention Is All You Need.
So I applied to attend, was accepted (as a startup founder), extended our travel plans by 1 day, and then I noticed that they were doing a hackathon in the leadup to this event. Too bad I’m not a top-notch developer, but wait…what if I was? What would I make?
Well, I’d integrate my PAICE.work startup’s behavioral assessment measurement system to be a completely confidential and public on-chain validatable score with their TEE-protected openweight models running behind the scenes for the whole assessment, that’s what. Then I’d write up a whitepaper about it and release it at the event.
Yep, that’d be awesome! Hmm… I wonder…
Turns out, totally possible. Thanks to the wonders of AI, and my multi-model based approach, I just spent the last 72hrs figuring out how to deliver the whole thing, then building and testing and iterating, then putting together the video and submission package by the deadline. Cool.
My entry is at https://devspot.app/projects/1096, video below. You can see the full Github repo at https://github.com/snapsynapse/paice-near-integration. And you can see me at NearCon next week when I’ll be standing in the circle of developers who’ve shipped a NEAR integration. Guess I’m a real developer now after all?
Wish me luck, there is a chance I could actually win something. If so, I’d chock it up to Beginner’s Luck, but you never know.
This was totally worthwhile in any case. After this experience I only have more respect for NEAR and how they’re building and making it easy for builders like me to use.
Now on to the whitepaper-in-a-week effort. While teaching my first “Applying AI in L&D” 3-day certificate workshop. This should be fun. Who needs sleep, anyway?