#238 Dominic Williams Reveals His Vision for the Internet Computer (ICP)

This episode is sponsored by Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. Get a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to boost your job's visibility! Claim your offer now: https://www.indeed.com/EYEONAI Dominic Williams' Bold Vision for The Internet Computer (ICP) | The Future of Decentralized Computing The internet is broken—can blockchain fix it? In this episode, Dominic Williams, the visionary behind The Internet Computer (ICP) and founder of DFINITY, reveals his plan to build a decentralized alternative to cloud computing. Discover how ICP is challenging Big Tech, replacing traditional IT infrastructure, and creating a tamper-proof, autonomous internet powered by smart contracts. What You'll Learn in This Episode: Why Dominic Williams believes the current internet is flawed How ICP aims to replace centralized cloud providers like AWS & Google Cloud The role of smart contracts in making the internet more secure and censorship-resistant The mission of DFINITY and how it started in 2016 The future of Web3, decentralized applications (dApps), and blockchain governance Don't miss this deep dive into the future of the internet! If you're interested in blockchain, decentralization, and the next evolution of the web, this episode is for you. Stay Updated: Craig Smith Twitter: https://twitter.com/craigss Eye on A. I. Twitter: https://twitter.com/EyeOn_AI (00:00) The Origins of The Internet Computer (02:57) Dominic Williams' Background in Tech (04:28) Early Innovations in Distributed Computing (07:08) The Birth of a 'World Computer' Concept (11:22) Reimagining IT: A Decentralized Alternative (13:45) The Creation of DFINITY and ICP (16:29) How ICP Differs from Traditional Blockchains (22:05) The Problem with Cloud-Based Blockchains (25:35) How ICP Ensures True Decentralization (29:25) AI & The Self-Writing Internet (35:24) How ICP Hosts AI & Smart Contracts (40:23) Understanding Reverse Gas and ICP's Economy (45:03) The Vision: A Truly Decentralized Internet (49:09) How To Use The Internet Computer (52:01) The Role of Nodes & Incentives in ICP (56:53) The Future of Web3 & Decentralized Applications (01:05:49) The Misconception of 'On-Chain' & Blockchain Hype

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I drew a lot of inspiration from Bitcoin originally. And Bitcoin is actually created by a sovereign network. So people have these things called ASICs that do proof of work computations that drive, that mediate participation in the network and they're used to drive consensus, a bit kind of in the role of a random number generator. So the internet computers also hosted on sovereign hardware. There are these things called node machines, which are built to standard specifications. And they're run by people called node providers. And at the moment, there's about 140 organizations, sometimes individuals, but usually companies around the world that run these node machines at scale. And they're all over the world. Generally speaking, in vast majority installed in colocation facilities.

• 0:43Craig S. Smith?

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• 2:26Craig S. Smith?

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• 2:55Speaker 00

  I've been around for a while. I've been writing software for more than 40 years. So gives you an indication. And, you know, I did do a computer science degree, as you might expect. I did pretty well. I graduated with the highest scoring first class honors and some prizes and some other stuff. But I didn't go into academia. I became an entrepreneur originally from London. And it had always been drawn to distributed systems. I've done a lot of different things. But the first big thing I worked on was during dot com. It's a thing called Smart Drives. It

• 3:35Speaker 00

  was a system for giving people fast access to remote files over dial up lines because back then we didn't have broadband and use something called differential compression and some kind of clever heuristics. So, you know, if I was trying to upload a file over my dial up, it would look at the file and think, well, there's this, there might be a similar file on the remote file server. And so we'll do this kind of differential compression and only have to upload a amount of the data. After that, kind of got dot commed, but we created like an enterprise product from

• 4:16Speaker 00

  the technology, sold that quite widely. I then created a kind of platform for commercial publishers online, ran that for several years. Then I

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Created a computer game, which was actually formative and, you know, I'd probably gained prior to crypto, my most useful formative experiences from that in a number of ways. And it was a massively multiplayer game. It was unlike any other game. It was directed at kids that think anyone's seen before or since. When I eventually closed it down, just couldn't keep it running for a bunch of reasons. And there's like a change.org petition to bring it back. But it grew to about three million users and behind the scenes, it used a whole lot of custom, sort of decentralized game server kind of technology

• 5:13Speaker 00

  I developed myself, allowed me to indulge my interest in distributed computing. It was powered by, I think, a Cassandra, which was one of the first decentralized NoSQL databases. We had the first sort of production installation of this thing called Cassandra. And then eventually, you know, I'd sort of been watching crypto from afar and eventually it sucked me in. And first in 2013 Bitcoin, of course, by the end of that year, I thought, okay, look, I'm going to create like a blockchain for games that will allow, you know, people to buy and sell virtual goods and move value between games. And that, of course, sort

• 5:57Speaker 00

  of had some very different requirements. It needed fast finality. It needed to be able to process much larger numbers of transactions a second than Bitcoin could. And so I started looking around, you know, things people were building at the time, started digging into the theory, found it was a bit shaky. Nothing really worked like I wanted it to. And, you know, spent 2014 really researching how, you know, we could build blockchain networks that could, you know, run much more efficiently, run much faster, scale and so on. I'd calculated that I needed to be able to process hundreds of thousands of transactions a second for this recurring payments vision I had at the

• 6:40Speaker 00

  time. So I was the first guy really sort of pioneering the repurposing of classical Byzantine fault tolerant computing techniques for the blockchain setting and also proposing, you know, things like sharding and. Consensus groups and means of like scaling out blockchain so they could, you know, process a lot more transactions and computation. And around this time, I was, you know, a kind of member of the early Ethereum community before Ethereum launched. And someone came up with this phrase world computer.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  And world computer, I think is a really wonderful expression. And my interpretation of world computer was different to other people's interpretation at the time. So my interpretation was that a blockchain could be used as a replacement for traditional IT and essentially extend the internet. So that, you know, the traditional internet, which launched in 1983 using the TCP IP protocols and obviously started growing exponentially in the 1990s with the advent of the world wide web. That that connects software, you know, it connects your web browser to a web server. So the web browser can download content and display it to you. It allows your WhatsApp client to send a message to another WhatsApp client.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  It allows your, you know, we're using it now with video streaming. But, you know, essentially connecting software. And I thought, wow, you know, you could like extend the internet with an overlay network. And and now you could, the internet could host software as well.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  And there's this idea that, you know, you could build things like, you know, social media, enterprise apps, and now AI on the internet itself.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  And obviously, there are a lot of advantages that come from building on a public network as opposed to a proprietary network. But more than that, I saw something in smart contracts, which were being developed for Ethereum. So within the context of Ethereum, these smart contracts were, you know, designed and envisaged to be things that. Would enable very basic DeFi like ERC 20, create a new token or a DEX with an automated market maker.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  And that was very much like their vision, you know, the community's vision of a world computer. But it's more like for me, it was like, well, that's a world calculator, not a world computer. And I saw something in smart contracts that I still don't think many people have clocked, which is that it's a new form of software. And, you know, I'd already spent decades coding and well, you know, this is a new kind of software. First of all, it's tamper proof, which means it's immune to traditional forms of cyber attack. You don't need to protect it with firewalls and anti malware.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  You know, it's guaranteed to run the correct code against the correct data.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  And I saw that could be immensely valuable and, you know, cybercrime and cyber attacks are continually worsening problem. So that, well, okay, that's pretty impressive, a new kind of software that's tamper proof and doesn't need protecting by cybersecurity. It's also unstoppable and within the fault bounds of the network. So, you know, you don't, it's obviously much more resilient, so it's almost more secure, more resilient. But the unstoppable piece means that you can simplify software design.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  And so I saw an opportunity to create a platform, not only where people could build, you know, web applications and services that didn't need protecting by cybersecurity and have this incredible resilience, but also where the actual software itself, the logic that makes these, you know, applications and services run,

• 10:45Speaker 00

  could be greatly simplified. So, you know, you can reduce the cost of ownership and time to market and things like that. So it's just sort of general improvement on software. And you also have these like remarkable new capabilities like autonomy. So autonomy is the property of running without a human controller or, you know, organization that controls it. And, you know, we're familiar with autonomy and applications like Uniswap on Ethereum. So, you know, it's a DEX. The DAO sort of stamps out the latest version of the DEX and it can't be changed afterwards.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  But you could, you know, I realized create a new kind of open internet service, and these exist on the internet computer now, where there's a digital governance system that controls the software that creates that service and all the data inside. And that could be essentially driven by the community that uses the service. And, you know, developers would be part of that community and would propose software updates. And if they are updated, you know, adopted by the governance system, they would be installed completely automatically. So it's a bit like, you know, you know, we've got open source projects where there's

• 12:03Speaker 00

  a kind of governance system of sorts with pull requests and things like that, which you see on places like GitHub. But you could go much further than that and actually have a much more sophisticated governance system that actually ran a running service. And that could also be useful for enterprise systems where you want to make sure that there's not just one administrator who holds the keys, who might turn rogue and or have an accident and do something bad. So, so I saw that, you know, a world computer could be an alternative to traditional IT, which would host this kind of serverless cloud environment within which you'd install

• 12:45Speaker 00

  and run a new kind of software with these kind of magical new properties that you can't get any other way. And so basically, I sort of set about building it. I proposed it in 2015, an old website on the Wayback Machine, Definity.io, 2015. And it was difficult, like convincing people that the science would work because people were so convinced that these networks couldn't scale and couldn't be performant. But 2016, you know, I was a co-founder in a sort of tech incubator in Palo Alto, California, which is the heart of Silicon Valley,

• 13:25Speaker 00

  and persuaded other people there to stop backing this Definity project thing. And 2016, October 2016, the Definity Foundation was created, which is where I work now and and in whose currently located. And February 2017, you know, the ledger of these tokens that would be used to sort of drive the tokenomics of the network were created, a bunch of them were assigned to Definity as an endowment. We raised a bit of money, we started scaling the team. We were very lucky, we benefited from some really super smart, you know, early hires.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  I mean, among the early teams, a guy called Timo Hankie, like, who had been the CTO of Terrahashing, an early Bitcoin guy who designed this thing called ASIC Boost, Ben Lin, who's the L from BLS cryptography, Andreas Rosberg, the co-inventor of WebAssembly, and so on. And somehow from that, we were able to really scale out this just brilliant R and D team. By the end of 2017, we were the largest R and D team in crypto. That has continued. You don't hear too much about us for much reasons, but we've, you know, continued to be this just, you know, R and D Leviathan.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  And eventually, after an awful lot of work, the Internet Computer launched May 2021. And it was a bumpy ride. I think a lot of people were very worried about the Internet Computer and what it might do to the status quo in blockchain and what did this mean? And to put it in perspective, like, you know, the Internet Computer today hosts things like social networks and AI models. And all associated, you know, data, content and computation. And that network resident code, which is an evolution of smart contracts on the Internet Computer, is processing HTTP and directly creating user experiences.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  So the whole thing's fully on the network, all these services running fully from the network. At the moment, traditional blockchains You know, remain focused really on sort of DeFi and the financial layer of decentralization. And they can't even, you know, store a single phone photo. So, you know, when you, if you took a photo with your phone, you couldn't store that on any of today's traditional blockchains or any other blockchain that someone defines as non-traditional. And they focus on like, you know, DeFi and tokenization. And whereas the internet computer does do define tokens, but it's also focused on compute,

• 16:18Speaker 00

  hosting computer scale and enabling the internet to host software as well as connect software. And, you know, the, the, the network's grown. We, we spent the vast majority of our money on R and D, not on marketing and so on. We think in the end, that's, that's the right way forward. And, you know, despite that, I mean, the computer on the network grew by more than 500% last year. And we think it's going to grow much faster mainly because of two, two big developments. One is just AI generally, the network will run AI and that consumes an awful lot of compute.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Cycles, cycles is the fuel for compute. And the other, the other is this thing called the self-writing internet, which is enabled by AI. And the self-writing internet is a paradigm where people just chat to AI. And it builds what you want according to your instructions, completely solo, and gives you a URL where you can access your custom website, custom web app, custom internet service, custom enterprise app. And even in production, while it's got data inside of it, you can keep on talking to the AI to update and improve it. And we think this self-writing internet paradigm is going to be like an iPhone moment for, you know.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Crypto that's focused on compute and the world computer paradigm generally because people will just be able to talk

• 17:55Speaker 00

  in a secure way with AI and build out their own corner of the internet ecosystem, their own internet functionality.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  In in real time and, you know, obtain this this sovereign functionality and the sovereignty piece is very important. That's running on a public network where they have complete control and there's nobody that can make them a captive customer. Where they they own the underlying software, even though they're not writing it themselves and all the underlying data.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  And they don't have to worry about security, of course, because it's tamper proof. They don't have to worry about resilience, which is unstoppable. And by talking to the AI, if they want, they can also create web three functionality and AI functionality because of course, these things they build on this on the internet computer can interact with AI via APIs. So, yeah, that's kind of a long summary, but that.

• 18:50Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, let me start asking some questions because

• 18:57Craig S. Smith?

  I mean, maybe you can back up and and and give an explanation of of the physical side of this. So blockchain as it exists today is really a registry, right? It's it's a ledger, immutable ledger, because it's it's it doesn't exist in any single place. It exists across all the nodes of the blockchain.

• 19:34Craig S. Smith?

  But you were talking about how, you know, the blockchain couldn't even store a cellphone photo. How does it where so?

• 19:48Craig S. Smith?

  So you have the blockchain.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Why is that the case, right? So, um, yeah, starting off with the basics.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  You know, I suppose I drew a lot of inspiration from Bitcoin originally. And Bitcoin is actually created by a sovereign network. So people have these things called ASICs that do proof of work computations that drive, that mediate participation in the network and they're used to drive consensus. A bit kind of in the role of a random number generator.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  So the internet computer is also hosted on sovereign hardware. There are these things called node machines, which are built to standard specifications. And they're run by people called node providers. And at the moment, there's about 140 organizations, sometimes individuals, but usually companies around the world that run these node machines at scale. And they're all over the world. Generally speaking, in vast majority installed in colocation facilities. So it's sovereign hardware for a sovereign network. And the reason that these machines are, stop me if I get too technical, but the reason

• 21:03Speaker 00

  the machines are built to a standard specification is that they're grouped into something called subnets behind the scenes by the network. And these subnets replicate the compute and data of units of software that are hosted by the network. And all of these machines are required to keep up with that replication of compute and data for the units of software assigned to their subnet. And you know, if one machine was built to a substandard specification, not the public specification, and it fell behind, the network might decide that there's something, you know, wrong with that node machine, it's faulty, and it could be sort of excluded from the network and so on.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  So that's why they build these machines to a standard public spec. And there are a bunch of differences. So, you know, with the exception of Bitcoin and a few other early blockchains, you know, most, what you call proof of state blockchains, actually reside mostly on cloud. So, you know, even Ethereum today, you know, there are hundreds of thousands of validators, as they're called, like nodes, that exist on Amazon Web Services. Now, if you're a kind of old school crypto theoretician like me, you might question some of the value in that, because while it's true you're replicating the data and

• 22:31Speaker 00

  compute hundreds of thousands of times, you know, you're doing so on a single infrastructure. I mean, in principle, Jeff Bezos could switch it off, right? Or it could all go down together. And in fact, Solana, which is one of the leading blockchains now, had 40% of its network on a European cloud called Hetzner. And overnight, Hetzner decided they didn't want Solana validators and switched them off, and they just lost that huge chunk of the network in one go. So, you know, that's why we have a slightly, first of all, a different model. We want the internet computer to run on diverse sovereign hardware rather than on cloud.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  But also, the other challenge with this model that proof of state blockchains have is they kind of want to give everybody a chance to create a validator, because that involves people staking their cryptocurrency. And this has the effect of taking their cryptocurrency off the market, and that can help the token price, because there's less sell pressure, right? All the cryptocurrency is locked up. So there's a kind of like dual purpose, and, you know, that's the hidden purpose of proof of stake. And we would say that... You know, for the purposes of compute, at least, if you have a network like Internet

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Computer focused on hosting, you know, tamper-proof unstoppable compute, it doesn't make sense to replicate computation and data hundreds of thousands of times. It's not necessary to do that, to obtain the security and resilience guarantees that the network provides. So instead, within the network, it uses something called deterministic decentralization, deterministic decentralization. So the network runs under the control of a sort of governance system called the network nervous system. And the governance system actually structures the network and configures it and upgrades the Internet Computer Protocol that runs it.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  But it also creates these subnets, which replicate units of software. And the more subnets you have, the more units of software you can host. The subnets themselves are invisible to the software. Like, if you were a unit of software, and I was a unit of software, and we're hosted by different subnets, you know, we can call each other's functions directly. It's like the Internet, right? Like, you know, we're actually connected. You know, this video between us is streaming over probably, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 subnets, but we don't know anything about that. You know, my laptop has an IP address, your laptop has an IP address, and that's enough, right? And it's the same on the Internet Computer. Like, the software doesn't see the subnets. But those subnets scale out

• 25:16Speaker 00

  capacity. And the question is, how can you create a subnet with the minimum amount of replication? Because that's costly. But that still provides the required security and resilience guarantees. So deterministic decentralization says, right, first of all, each of these node machines must come from a different node provider. There's like 140 odd of these companies and sometimes individuals that run these node machines at scale. So, for example, with an application subnet, which is a bit different to a fiduciary subnet, it will pull 13 machines together, or provide them with instructions to run a protocol

• 25:59Speaker 00

  to create a subnet, right? And those node machines will come from different node providers.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  They will be installed in different independent data centers around the world, in different geographies,

• 26:15Speaker 00

  and different jurisdictions. So I mean, it's common sense that obviously if the no machines came from a single provider and that provider went bankrupt, the subnet would fail. That's no good. If the provider became evil, they could do what they like. That's no good. So that, you know, the no machines come from different no providers. Similarly, if the no machines came from different no providers, but they were all installed in the same data center. Well, that wouldn't work because the data center could, you know, be blown up by a drone, go bankrupt or turn evil. So these no machines from different no providers have to be in different data centers.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  If those data centers are in the same geography, let's let's say they were all around Amsterdam. And, you know, Vladimir Putin put a nuclear bomb on Amsterdam. Well, guess what? That that would also break because all the data centers are in, you know, the same area. So you require the data centers to be geographically distributed. And similarly, they shouldn't be in the same jurisdiction. Let's say you distributed them around Europe. And overnight, the EU decides to ban decentralized networks and they send their agents out. Well, again, it would stop working and, you know, you have to be tamper-proof and unstoppable. So the the data centers not only have to be geographically distributed, but also in different jurisdictions. And you using that paradigm for just, you know, basic system software.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  We're running it like the network runs at thirteen X replication. I actually think there's a strong argument it can come down to like seven X, but we'll see. And the actual numbers come from like some kind of Byzantine fault tolerant math considerations. Has to be something called three F plus one, but you could do like thirteen, you could do ten, you could do seven, probably that's the minimum. But of course, at every stage, you know, you're you're reducing replication, reducing cost. And in the future, it'll also be possible for people running software within limits.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  And within a framework of scaling privileges to to control the replication within that framework. At the moment, like fiduciary stuff is replicated like fifty fifty fifty X plus. But that's how it works and it's very effective and I mean, you know, it's all science based. So,

• 28:33Speaker 00

  you know, the question is like, you know, what is the required replication factor for this specific unit of software's needs? And it happens accordingly, which is of course perfectly logical and the right way to do it.

• 28:47Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Yeah. So you've got this, these distributed nodes. If you're, if you, you talked about the units of software, do you mean that in in software terms, like software, a piece of software is a stack of units that that work together and they you're placing each unit in a different data center and then they they come together to to

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:23Craig S. Smith?

  operate.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, let's say you're a developer. And in the future, maybe you're just one of the eight billion people on the planet that can use natural language instructions to tell the AI what you want to do in the self writing internet paradigm.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  You know, you're going to create some units of software and they're going to be installed on the internet computer. You're not concerned with where they are. I mean, in a default configuration, you know, your your software unit is going to be replicated all over the world, you know, because of the deterministic centralization concerns that I just mentioned.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  And you're just dealing with the internet computer. So while there is some configurability in the general case, you're not even thinking about that. You're just uploading this unit of software to the internet computer. It's actually called a canister because it's a bundle of something called WebAssembly, which is something that WASM bytecode that will also run inside your web browser and persistent memory pages. And this canister smart contract, if you want to call it that, or a canister. It can either be a complete system, like, you know, it's not going to be a social network because of you have to scale the storage and compute, but it could be certainly, you know, quite a substantial complete enterprise app. Or it can be something much smaller. So if you look at like,

• 30:50Speaker 00

  like the single OpenChat, which was the first open internet service in the world. It's been running for a few years now and growing steadily.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Those guys, they give each individual user their own canister behind the scenes. And that canister is used to, you know, record that user's chat history, all their chat histories and stuff like that. And that's an example of, you know, a canister being used as a small unit of software within a much larger system. But there are plenty of examples where people have built pretty substantial systems that are all contained inside a single canister. And again, stop me if I get too technical, but these canisters are what is known in, you know, theoretical computing terminology as a software actor, right? And actors were, I think, first invented for use with a language called Erlang,

• 31:44Speaker 00

  which was a language that's very, was very popular with telecoms companies. And it could create like, you know, massively scalable, resilient, highly parallelized infrastructures. And so anyway, a software actor is some, something that runs in parallel with other software actors and interacts by messages. Except within the Internet Computer

• 32:08Speaker 00

  serverless cloud framework, those messages are just function calls and function call results. And, you know, you're given the illusion that this code is synchronous, but it's not. It's actually asynchronous.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  And, you know, I can call your function and I'll get a result, but, you know, we're actually running in parallel and you're on one subnet and I'm on another subnet kind of thing. And, you know, an actor has private state. And in this case, the software logic runs in its own persistent memory. And I don't want to get too technical again, but on the Internet Computer, logic and data is kind of the same thing. So it's just state and.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Instead of having a database and files, you just define your programming abstractions, like this is a variable, like, you know, for example, define a blog post as, you know, title, content, likes, comments, or whatever, right? And then you just define your blog as like, you know, something along the lines of var blog equals array of posts, right? And it all just lives in persistent memory. And that that's a paradigm called orthogonal persistence. And that's another big innovation that you see on the internet computer. We've been trying to, you know, completely reimagine software in a more modern, effective form. And that actually turns out to be very important as well for working with AI when AI builds completely solo.

• 33:34Craig S. Smith?

  You know, in the self-writing computer, self-writing internet, I'm sorry.

• 33:41Craig S. Smith?

  You have, you talk about talking to a chatbot that will code a piece of software. Where does the chatbot reside?

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Well, so the self-running internet is a general concept and we're obviously developing technology that we feel enables our own, you know, version. There's a platform called Caffeine.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Can't log in yet, but it's a caffeine.ai and

• 34:12Speaker 00

  that that is actually chatbot large language model agnostic. So in principle, any large language model could be used.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  And in fact, we'll probably give people a choice. That being said, number one, we are, you know, tweaking these models and fine tuning them for the specific task at hand and so they they they can better use the technology, special technologies involved. And that bot could be something like a fine-tuned version of, you know,

• 34:51Speaker 00

  GPT four oh, or it could be something like DeepSeek three, or even R one, depending on needs, that's running on the Internet Computer itself.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  At the moment, the Internet Computer runs custom AIs. And although the, you know, the capabilities are scaling pretty rapidly with people working to extend Internet Computer Protocol to, you know, scale back the limits. Currently, you know, you can run a neural network that does facial recognition very easily. You can run people already running DeepSeek, but with a very small number of parameters. Later this year, you probably get up to like, I don't know, maybe sixteen billion parameters, something like that. But oftentimes, for coding tasks, you want larger models.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Because, for example, you want them to be multilingual, because this is self-writing Internet. It's a paradigm for the world. People need to be able to instruct the AI in their natural, their own native language.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  And the Internet Computer will support something called AI workers, which are kind of like,

• 36:01Speaker 00

  it's AI inference that's been made deterministic, that's running in replicated form, so you can be sure it's tamper-proof.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  You know, that would be an alternative. So it could be, you know, on the one hand, it could be GPT four oh, on the other hand, it could be DeepSeek running on the Internet Computer in a deterministic, tamper-proof form. And there might be, you know, different, or there will be different, you know, considerations, like, you know, cost.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. That kind of thing.

• 36:35Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, let's stop for a sec. So you said there are people running a scaled-down version of DeepSeek.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:42Craig S. Smith?

  On the, okay, so.

• 36:45Craig S. Smith?

  Is is is are the uh is the source code for DeepSeek? And the weights uh divided up by function? Or into units and then the units are distributed on where or or is the entire? Uh model replicated across all the nodes?

• 37:12Speaker 00

  I'm just trying to figure out where. Yeah, so uh I mean uh currently, when people are running custom AI, but it's on. Uh you know, some of it's dedicated to application logic, so it's replicated thirteen X. Um and I mentioned that probably thirteen X is overkill. And in the future, you can imagine um subnets with um lower levels of replication, but there's. Without getting into technical details, the internet, there are other changes. While it's easy to create a subnet at low levels replication, even four X replication. Um there are second security concerns, so you have to that there'll be some other work that's involved in.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  In updating the network so that it can handle like lower security, um lower resilience subnets. But I think in the future, like people might choose to run AI at like four X or seven X replication. And these kind of with lower security privileges. Um but at the moment, it's running thirteen X and you know, uh generally, I haven't looked into how they're doing it. But I'd imagine it's just a few canisters. A single unit of software can have up to five hundred gig of persistent memory associated with it currently. Um but uh the.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Current framework is thirty two bit is actually as we kind of speak, it's. Um that I see Internet Computer Protocol is being upgraded to supports sixty four bit. Web Assembly, Wasm Compute and um so the thirty two bit environment.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Create some limitations and that's why you know you've got these models with relatively tiny numbers of parameters but 64 bits coming as we speak and the amount of sort of main memory if you like this you don't see in a canister that which is you know can be used to store cash weights and so on is going to be rapidly scaling but having said that I don't think that's suitable for self writing internet. Self writing internet is a mass market.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Will be a mass market phenomenon and you need like AI to run much more efficiently so I think it will you know it'll actually run on these like standard models that are running on these things called AI workers within the network that's something that's coming this year so you'll see like you know different models being used in the self writing internet and people will often make choices based on considerations like you know cost and security and the ability of the model and things like that. What I will say is you know when we fine tune deep seek we've been getting some really, really good results.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  You know the best out of the box

• 39:57Speaker 00

  proprietary model is hands down Claude Sonnet for soft for coding but you can't fine tune it. You can fine tune for GPT 4O and when we fine tune it we can you know take it beyond Claude. But deep seek you know we've you know it's quite a large model and we've been playing around with it but the results we've been getting are very good.

• 40:23Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, so so I'm correct that the model is may be replicated in full across the nodes.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:33Craig S. Smith?

  And and to access the model then you you have to

• 40:40Craig S. Smith?

  Go through the blockchain, the blockchain either pulls together the different units and delivers, I mean, it's the interface between the user and the

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no. So that's the difference. So I think there's a lot of like confusion in the space because people can't really get their head around the the capabilities of the Internet Computer Network. The Internet Computer basically creates a single serverless cloud environment that is essentially running on a blockchain. And the reason this is hard for people to grok is that

• 41:17Speaker 00

  you know, today, there's no other blockchain in existence that can even store a phone photo, let alone store, you know, the, the, the hundreds of gigabytes of weights associated with a large language model and actually run a large language model. And so, you know, the confusion I think comes about that a lot of people talk about like, oh, we've you know, got this decentralized cloud blockchain. And all they're doing really is creating a kind of tokenization and access control there.

• 41:44Craig S. Smith?

  Right.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  And, you know, but people spin up, you know, you know, Docker images, if you like, right, that you can run, you can acquire control of on payment of some tokens, right? And these Docker images sometimes, well, actually more often than not, actually just running on Amazon Web Services, but you're just creating like a tokenized interface to Amazon, but they can also run on people's, you know, home, home computers and stuff like that.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  You know, look, I mean, the Internet Computer is like, you know, hundreds of people have been working on it for years, like, you know, very senior computer scientists, it's a whole different thing, traditional, traditional blockchain, like traditional blockchain is like, you know, like token databases, you know, essentially, sometimes highly optimized, like Solana can process a large number of transactions a second for, which have very little compute associated with them for things like meme coins. But the Internet Computer is a very different kind of beast. It's much more complicated, involves much deeper science and technology. And Provides like a kind of network that that is, you know, uh, pretty unique.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  And um, when you build on the internet computer, you're building, uh, you know, you're, you're, you're creating code that runs on the network itself, right? Um, within this serverless cloud environment where the software is really a form of smart contracts.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  And, uh, you know, it's tamper-proof, so you don't need to protect it using cybersecurity like, um, and it's unstoppable and you can make it autonomous, which means that it can exist without a human or organizational owner and controller, like either in unmodifiable form or under the control of a digital governance system. And the, the network, um, is using this scheme I mentioned deterministic decentralization to ensure that the individual units of software, um, are being run with the levels of security and resilience that they actually need in order to meet, meet the guarantees that the network provides. And the internet computers envisaged, envisaged and designed as

• 44:00Speaker 00

  an alternative to traditional IT. We're trying to reinvent compute. So, you know, we, we want the world instead, you know, currently like, you know, software systems and the, you know, services and applications they create are really the foundations of modern society. Like, there's eight billion people, um, on earth and they couldn't possibly, um, be supported, kept alive without a very high degree of computerized automation. Um, and, and also, you know, things like social media are a part of our everyday lives, like it's how we live. And so we believe like societal, you know, the, the computers are societal foundation and therefore it should be part of the internet itself, not part of, you know,

• 44:45Speaker 00

  um, closed proprietary, private computing infrastructures. And, or at least there should be an alternative and people can build on the internet rather than these, you know, closed proprietary, private infrastructures like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. So, you know, that, that's our vision, you know, the vision is that you're building on the internet. Now the internet can, can host software as well as connect it. And the, this soft, that this software is You know, has has new properties and capabilities.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Such as being tap proof and unstoppable and can and optionally autonomous and so on.

• 45:18Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  But the whole thing is on the network. There's no, there's no traditional IT involved. It's not like a traditional blockchain that's just acting as a gatekeeper through tokenization and some very simple access control functionality to to centralized traditional IT, whether that's a cloud or somebody's gaming computer in their basement. Everything runs on the Internet computer network itself.

• 45:40Craig S. Smith?

  Right. And and the nodes of the computer network are, as you said, distributed

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:46Craig S. Smith?

  across geographies and jurisdictions and

• 45:51Craig S. Smith?

  and and each node has a copy of the

• 45:58Craig S. Smith?

  software.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:59Craig S. Smith?

  Not not just.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  We're going to subnet. Yeah. So if you're if you're a unit of software or, you know, your the unit of software you're interacting with is is going to be assigned to a subnet. And then that subnet comprises a bunch of node machines from different node providers installed in different data centers and different geographies and different jurisdictions. And that subnet is, you know, efficiently replicating the computing data of that software, but it's doing it using, you know, Byzantine fault tolerant distributed computing techniques, which basically means that even if an adversary takes physical control of one of those node machines or some subset of those node machines, they cannot

• 46:44Speaker 00

  corrupt the data hosted by the subnet and they cannot interfere with its operation. And that's, of course, how you get, it's the same as, you know, blockchain in a sense. And that's how, you know, bit, you know, that's why running a Bitcoin node won't allow you to steal Bitcoins, right? You're just part of a much bigger network and you'd need like half of the hashing power to to to more than half the caching power to corrupt it, at least in principle. So.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  You know, you get these guarantees, but you know, you're the difference with, I think the networks have got a cache or something like that. You mentioned was, you know, what what's happening there is like you've got a blockchain. That has a ledger and has tokens and that's really like giving people access control to these centralized.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Computers, for example, a gaming PC in someone's basement or or a, you know, an Amazon Web Services instance, which ultimately, of course, is, you know, just running on some specific machine in Amazon Web Services data centers with a bit of virtualization going on. This is very different, like the the if you know, if you if you install some software on the Internet computer, it has no location. Its location is cypher space. And the network dynamically

• 48:02Speaker 00

  decides where its data is and computation is replicated. So these subnets, by the way, I mean, the membership of these subnets is dynamic, like the network can add new nodes as needed. It can remove failed nodes or remove them for other reasons. If a subnet is overloaded, it can actually split it into two subnets by spawning to divide the load dynamically.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  And so, you know, if you ask like, where is this software that's been installed on the Internet computer? Or even where is this AI model that's been installed on the AI computer on the Internet computer? The answer is it's it's all over the world, right? And its particular location is also dynamic. It can change based on what the protocol does, which has this thing called the network nervous system, which which which kind of centralized governance system that actually

• 48:53Speaker 00

  has automated control of the network and can, you know,

• 48:57Speaker 00

  you know, add nodes to subnets, remove nodes, create new subnets, split subnets, that that kind of thing. So, you know, really, like, what's the location of software and data on the Internet computer? Cypher space.

• 49:08Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And and you have this, what what's the incentive for the node operators? You have this concept of reverse gas.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:17Craig S. Smith?

  Can you talk about that?

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Sure. So

• 49:21Speaker 00

  on a traditional blockchain, like Ethereum.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  You know, when you interact with a smart contract, you have to pay some gas with, you know,

• 49:34Speaker 00

  to pay for the computation, right? And, you know, gas on Ethereum is like fuel for computation. So with a traditional blockchain, every transaction is crafted manually by the user. So you have a wallet like MetaMask, and you craft this transaction that will call into a smart contract. And when you craft that transaction, you specify, you know, how much you'll, you know, how much you'll pay for the computation, right? And there's a kind of fee market.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  And so you add the gas when you're, as part of the transaction effectively. And then, you know, using the key that the wallet holds, you know, you press send, it gets sent to the network, and you get told when it's executed. So very clearly, if you have to manually create every

• 50:24Speaker 00

  function call to a smart contract using your wallet, like, this is, this can't be, you know, used as a basis for building a social network. You, you need like smart contracts that can not only run much more efficiently and scalably in orders of, many orders of magnitude, but that can do things like process HTTP to create interactive user experience. So you have to, you know, the whole thing is re-architected and re-imagined. On the internet computer, there's a scheme called reverse gas. And that means that the software pays for its own computation. And it does so using something called cycles, which are analog to gas on Ethereum. And it's a, you know, the best analogy is that it's like an electric car. So if you have a Tesla, you know, you plug it in

• 51:10Speaker 00

  to charge up the battery, and you drive around. As it drives around, the battery gets depleted, and you have to plug it in again. Or if you're on the move, go to a supercharging station or something like that, right? And

• 51:23Speaker 00

  Software on the internet computers, um, kind of similar. You charge it up with these things called cycles. As it performs computations and stores data in its memory and so on, it depletes these cycles. If it runs out of cycles, it stops working. And you've got like three months to fill it up before it gets scavenged. Right. But anybody can can fill it up like so. Say you're a bit of software and I'm using you and you run out of cycles and stop working. I can send more cycles and you'll start working again. So the tokenomics works as follows. There are these things called ICP tokens, which are multi-purpose kind of utility token.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  They can, they play the role of cryptocurrency within the network. But and they also allow you to participate in governance, like you can stake them to create a voting neuron within the network nervous system. But for the purposes of understanding the basic economics, um, number one, you can convert these ICP into cycles and the network is aware of the value of ICP because it has oracle functionality. And ICP tokens worth one XDR. An XDR is a standard drawing right of virtual currency defined by the IMF. I don't know what it's worth now, but last time I looked, it was like, you know, $1.40 or $1.50. Right.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  And if you convert ICP tokens worth one XDR into cycles, you get a trillion cycles. And cycles give you a predictable amount of compute. But so it's like electricity. So like, you know, um, it's like that, you know, you know, that it's going to cost you so much to charge the battery of your electric car with this amount of electricity kind of thing. So the computation on the network creates demand for ICP ultimately. The ICP token, which is named after the protocol, internet computer protocol. Because, you know, people having to convert ICP tokens into cycles to power their compute.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  In the mode of an electric battery, using the reverse gas model. On the other hand, the network, so that's deflationary. On the other hand, the network minces new ICP tokens to reward people, not directly, but reward people participating in governance, who can generate ICP through a mechanism. And it also minces new ICP for these people running the node machines. But it's not like a traditional blockchain where they're sort of speculating.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  The governance system of the network is setting expected costs for, you know, purchasing node machine hardware, co-locating it, operating it, paying for the bandwidth and so on. And the network decides that they should get a, you know, a certain return over four years. And then ICP is being issued in varying amounts depending on its current price in order to cover the, you know, in order to remunerate the node providers. And of course, if you think about it, this is completely necessary because node providers

• 54:52Speaker 00

  can have fixed costs, you know, they have to, like, a node machine costs you about $20,000 to build and that, you know, some of them are offering quite large numbers of them. You have to co-locate it, so you have to have contracts with data centers. They're consuming bandwidth again, you've got to have a bandwidth contract. So in order to have a stable network, the network remunerates them in a predictable way. And then the network also modulates the remuneration available in different areas of the world, not only with respect to differing costs, but also to create incentives to deploy these node machines in different parts of the world.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Because the network relies on decentralization, just like the internet. So for example, you know, you know, compute might be a bit more expensive in Singapore. But it will, you know, initially, at some point, the network was not any willing to pay that, but a bit more to incentivize people to deploy these machines in Singaporean data centers. But if you look at like the dashboard of the internet computer, you'll see there's no machines installed in data centers all over the world. Like there's one in South Africa.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  There's a data center in South Africa hosting node machines now. There's one in Panama or something. So they're all, all, all over the world. And, you know, the network nervous system, which is setting these kind of policies with respect to how much you, financial revaluation you receive in real terms, is not only making sure that these node providers can run these machines in a stable way, but also creating these financial incentives to maximize the decentralization of the network, which in turn enables it to create, you know, tamper-proof unstoppable, host tamper-proof unstoppable software to reduce cost. Because it needs geographical and jurisdictional decentralization.

• 56:53Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. How many node machines do you have right now? And is there a sort of a critical mass that you need to make this viable? And, and how does someone use the internet computer?

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Well.

• 57:10Craig S. Smith?

  Like if I wanted to use it, what do I do?

• 57:13Speaker 00

  So I think there are like 1,500 of these machines around the world at the moment. Actually, not all of them are used. Most of them are just kept in a pool. And so that if there's a spike in demand, there's,

• 57:28Speaker 00

  you know, some kind of safety buffer that allows the network to scale up quickly.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  But to use the Internet Computer is simple. You just interact with it over the Internet. And that might sound mysterious. How can that be? How can that work? Right? Because, you know, the, you know, the software is not in one place. It's in lots of places. Well, the network incorporates these subnet. But actually, there's a sort of perimeter called boundary nodes. And these, you know, and domain, default domain names. So each like unit of software actually has its own kind of URL. Right? And you, when you interact with the Internet Computer,

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Dynamic DNS will connect you, first of all, I think, to a boundary node that's nearest to you. So you get the lowest possible latency. And then the, I'm oversimplifying here, but the boundary node then will forward your request and the response that results from your request to the replica in the subnet hosting the software you're interacting with.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  That's kind of nearest to you in terms of minimum latency. Right?

• 58:48Speaker 00

  And so, you know, it's that the domain name system and the routing of the boundary nodes perform, determine which individual replica you're interacting with. But of course, your compute, when you, you know, you submit a function call that changes memory called an update call, of course, it's replicated across all nodes. But, but sometimes you just want to perform a query that doesn't need to modify memory and so on. And that, that's done quickly by this kind of routing based on latency. But of course, there are other considerations too, because, you know, an individual replica inside a subnet node might be down, you know, be faulty in some way. There are load balancing issues. It doesn't make any sense if.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  You've got something hosted on a subnet and let's say, you know, it's very, this piece of software is very popular in South Korea. Right. And it turns out the subnet's got like one node in South Korea. Yeah, now of course, that's going to produce the lowest response time for kind of query computation, but if, if, if all that massive load just goes to one replica in the subnet that's in South Korea, then you know, it could get overloaded. So you have to have some like, you know, clever logic that will at some point begin distributing these requests to other replicas in the subnet. And you have to have things like, you know, DOS protections and rate limiting for individual IP addresses that might make requests. And so, you know,

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  in actual fact, behind the scenes, it gets pretty complicated, but, but at a high level, that's how it works. Yeah.

• 1:00:25Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and so is there a, a URL that people access to?

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think that, I mean, I, I don't know off by heart, but so by the way, like, you know, you, when you've got a piece of software on the Internet Computer,

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  you, you, there are standard bits of software you can just like load a website into. So if you go to internetcomputer.com, which is the website for the Internet Computer that we maintain, that, that website's actually hosted on the Internet Computer, like, and so you can map your own custom URL, your own custom domain name to your software on the Internet Computer. But with respect to uploading that software, you know, there's a developer kit called DFX and,

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  you know, when you create software that's going to be installed on the Internet Computer, there's some magic going on behind the scenes. It's interacting with various URLs and then you're, you know, through that process, your software will get an ID and this will kind of determine. Like future URLs you interact with and things like that. But from, from, you know, that's all hidden. Like the user experiences, just this thing called the Internet Computer is part of the Internet. You don't have to worry about how that works.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  If you've got an Internet connection and you've got like the software developer kit, you can like deploy code on it.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  You know, if you want to go to the Internet Computer website, you just type in internetcomputer.org. And, you know, it's served off the Internet Computer. That, you know, first open Internet service I mentioned, OpenChat, it's very cool.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  And, you know, you just type in OC.app, I think. And, you know, that's mapping behind the scenes to some underlying small sort of software, you know, network residence software URL. But you as a user don't even know. I mean, what has actually been one of the problems we've, we've experienced is that people don't know when something's on the Internet Computer. And in this world of Web three, you know, there was this kind of slight subversion of the meaning of on-chain. So, you know, people will say, oh, look, this social media service or this, you know, whatever is on Solana, it's on Ethereum, right? It's on-chain.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  And like, you know, Coinbase has this tagline, you know, on-chain is new online. And, and people, when they hear that, they think those things are running on the blockchain. But it doesn't mean that at all. It's like a subversion of the original language I used as far as back as, you know, 2015, 2016. What it means for them is it is built on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud or something. And it's on-chain because it has an associated token. Like, is it like, you know, I, I have tokens. And so I'm on-chain kind of thing.

• 1:03:19Craig S. Smith?

  Right.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  The problem is, you know, we did surveys and it's like more than 95% of people, when they hear this language, and I'm talking, you know, crypto journalists, mainstream journalists, crypto investors, mainstream investors, developers, DJs. When people hear this language like, oh, this is built on blockchain XYZ. They think that blockchain XYZ is really like the Internet Computer. And in actual fact, it's nothing like that at all. It's just, it's a token database and it's holding an associated token for this completely centralized thing running on like, you know, a cloud service.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  But the thing is like, you know, and then people can interact with OpenChat OC.app. And it's this highly interactive kind of, you know, social network chat service. That is completely autonomous, runs under the control of a decentralized governance system. Like the community actually runs its own community, runs the service itself. There's no backdoors, like, there's no backdoor at all. And it's coming off the internet computer. And you can make it and use it as a progressive web app. And the problem is that people see that and it's like, well, that's web two functionality, right? And they don't understand the difference. Like that thing is, is running on the internet computer on a decentralized network. And

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  this other thing that's also described as being built on a blockchain. They, they have a different meaning for on-chain. What they mean is it's built, it's completely centralized and run by developers on a, you know, cloud infrastructure. But it has an associated token that's on the data, the blockchain that really functions as a decentralized token database. And these are very, very different things, but Sure. The use of that language, this on-chain language has confused the hell out of people. Like, nobody understands. And, you know, when you're trying to explain, hey, like this blockchain, you can't even store a phone photo on it. You know, it's really just designed for DeFi and, and tokens. Maybe like access control, like there's a cache thing.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Like people look at you like you're from Mars, they just can't grok it because the language originally like on-chain. It's like saying on cloud, right? If someone says it's on cloud, well, you know, it's built on cloud. So on-chain should mean it's built on-chain, but that's not how they mean it. They mean it like centralized, built on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud or something like that. And there's an associated token. And then you're trying to explain that and it's really tough. And, um, you know, when we say on-chain or on the network, we, you know, it's the real, it's the literal. But, but we don't know what to do because I mean, I, I was, you know, uh, really, you know, early pioneer of this kind of stuff.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  And, and, um, you know, I probably have people trying to say it's fully on-chain and stuff like that. And now this language that we we had in like early days is completely changed. But the problem is it's not clear anymore like how do you, you know, the context of the internet computer? What language do you use now to explain the difference? We're kind of like completely just stuck. And, um, you know, we we found that even like, you know, I'd spoken to like managing editors of very major mainstream publications, managing editors of crypto. I had one shocking interview where someone connected us. And after about 20 minutes, I'd been explaining this vision of, you know, extending the internet.

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  So not only does it connect software, host software, and this this new kind of software is tamper proof and unstoppable, and all these amazing things, and you can create open internet servers. And I could see the guy was looking bad tempered. So I said, paused, I do talk too much, it's true. I paused and looked at him and he sort of like had a real scowl on his face and he shrugged his shoulder. And he said, so what's new? And I said, what do you mean what's new? He said, well, Ethereum and Solana, they're decentralized clouds too. So what's new? And it was like, I realized like the, you know, people like this language has confused people. And I, let's be honest, it probably was designed to confuse people, right? And, um, it was an overloading of the language that didn't need to be made.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Like on chain had a very clear meaning. Like, why did on chain have to change to mean some kind of centralized thing in under the control of a bunch of developers that has an associated token? Like, it doesn't make any sense, but the language is so pervasive. Um, and it's supported by all the venture capital backers of these projects that have an associated token, all the crypto press, all the crypto industry research, which of course tends to be like really sort of, well, it's not,

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  you know, sometimes supporting vested interests and so on.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Like people can't believe it like and it's fooled everybody. This is the incredible thing like even people who are like managing editors of crypto, huge international publications have been completely kind of misled and confused by this terminology on chain, this overloading and change to mean having an associated token. So it's very tough for us because

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  you know, how do we like, what language can we use to explain this very fundamental and important difference? I mean, these are completely different things, right? And similarly, the other one we had a lot of it is this kind of idea of decentralized cloud. Like for us, what we mean when we say decentralized cloud is like that the cloud itself is decentralized. You know, and it's, it doesn't have, you know, when you're putting software into this serverless decentralized cloud, it doesn't, or an AI model or whatever it is. It doesn't have a location. It's in cypher space. And you know, you're guaranteed that the logic will run as written against the correct data. It's tamper proof, immune to cyber attack. Nobody has backdoor access to it. It's unstoppable. You can make it autonomous and a bunch of other stuff, right?

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  But

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  other people, when they talk about a centralized cloud, what they really mean is that there's a blockchain with some kind of tokenization and access control that gains you access to the cloud computing that's completely centralized, right? It's running on someone's gaming PC or it's an Amazon Web Services instance that someone is connected to the blockchain. But you know, when someone says decentralized cloud, like what you imagine is that the compute is decentralized, not that there's a blockchain gating access to centralized compute. Because centralized compute can be switched off. It can be corrupted by whoever's running it and got the keys to it.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  It's certainly not tamper proof. It's certainly nonstopable. It can't be autonomous because autonomy implies no human organizational control, like just controlled by logic. And so, you know, we do struggle, like, we really do struggle. And I think the other pieces, just like, you know, people, well, how's it even possible? And, you know, I mean, it's a technical area. I would discuss deterministic centralization and How deterministic centralization enables you to run with less replication, run this host the software with less replication while still delivering on on security and resilience guarantees. But you know, there's a lot more to it than that. And of course, when you're talking about something like the Internet Computer, it's non trivial. We have hundreds of people we work.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  I think at this point, very significantly more than 1,000 person years of R and D has been dedicated to the effort, and we've been going for years. And that's just, again, very different. Like, you know, you get different results if you're willing to invest that much in R and D than if you're just copying, paste, copy, pasting an existing blockchain and making some tweets, tweaks and rebranding it.

• 1:11:00Craig S. Smith?

  Sure.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  But it's, it's again, very, very difficult and because of the noise in Web3 to actually communicate to people the profound nature of the differences.

• 1:11:08Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And you mentioned for, for people that want to explore this, you mentioned two URLs. You said internetcomputer.com and internetcomputer.org. Are those aliases for the same?

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  No, just yeah, internetcomputer.org is, you know, a website and you can get a lot of resources, like developer resources and, and things like that. And then there's a new one. I think it's just a deck at the moment, like, so people are interested in the self-writing internet. You can find that ICP.ai, but I think it's just decked ICP.ai at the moment. But actually, there's a great URL to get started. It's internetcomputer.org slash library. And if you go to internetcomputer.org slash library, you can find all kinds of things. You can find, in a nutshell, primers, like, you know, short, short introductory documents.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  You can find decks covering like the base network, but also things like self-writing internet. I think there's about 20, if people want it. There's about 20, you know, academic papers out there that talk about some of the underlying, you know, the, not only the overall architecture employed, but also some of the underlying mathematics, which is actually very beautiful and interesting, but sometimes quite complicated.

• 1:12:29Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Okay. So internetcomputer.org slash library, that's where people should go.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, great place to start. Yeah.

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