10 Questions: AIOZ Network Founder & CEO Erman Tjiputra
In this short blog series, we talk with the core team building AIOZ Network, asking questions that aim to paint more color around the background, collective ethos, and mission of the people shaping the future of DePIN AI computation, storage, and streaming.
We're talking to AIOZ Network Founder and CEO Erman Tjiputra this time.
Hi Erman!
What was the inspiration behind AIOZ Network?
My participation in S.E.T.I. (a nonprofit research organization “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Institute”) played a large part.
S.E.T.I was my first major exploration into the world of decentralized nodes and computational contributions. Sharing computing resources for the common good made me wonder how many other applications this type of collaboration could benefit from.
Both peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) and blockchain technology were of interest to me from the early days - I was also a significant sharer in the private sharing sites.
These experiences all shaped the strategy and vision behind A.I.O.Z. Network.
When did you start working on AIOZ Network?
I began collaborating with the core AIOZ Network team in 2013.
We were researching and experimenting with various emerging technologies before the official creation of the AIOZ Network team in 2017, which followed the emergence of blockchain and the growing popularity of smart contracts.
Many may not know this, but AIOZ AI is a separate entity and has been running alongside the AIOZ Network blockchain project, providing A.I. solutions to businesses over the years; we recently decided to merge the two companies together to attack dePIN head-on!
What past achievements are you most proud of?
Being Accepted in Rank A Peer-Reviewed AI Conferences is a testament to our team’s technical caliber and something we are very proud of.
There’s no prize money, and being accepted is like winning at the Academy Awards in the world of Academia - AIOZ Network is one of few blockchain AI projects with these highly coveted accolades.
Another achievement worth mentioning is AIOZ Beetle Bot, our AI-powered last-mile delivery robot that was rolled out in hospitals.
Also, we have worked alongside several notable and respected universities worldwide on AI academic research papers.
Throughout the years, Erman and the AIOZ Research Team published several cited whitepapers and research documents, which include:
“Autonomous Navigation with Mobile Robots using Deep Learning and the Robot Operating System”, ROSBook 2021. [paper] [github]
“Top-k Self-Assessment Regularizer for Fine-Grained Visual Classification”, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021). [paper].
“Light-weight Deformable Registration usingAdversarial Learning with Distilling Knowledge”, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2021. [paper].
“Leveraging Meta-annotation for Meta-learning in Medical Visual Question Answering”, The 24th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2021. [paper].
What is it like running a business building 4 major dePIN infrastructure products?
If I said it was simple, I wouldn't be truthful.
In the years since the launch in 2022, my team has grown to over 40 developers and a total team of nearly 50 talented Blockchain engineers, AI Scientists, UI/UX designers, project managers, business developers, and marketers.
While this has been no small feat, and we are only at the beginning, I am honored to be working alongside some of the best minds in blockchain and AI, and I wouldn't swap places with anyone for the world.
If you could explain what AIOZ Network represents in 1 short sentence, what would it be?
We've tried to make this as simple as possible to understand.
AIOZ Network is DePIN for Web3 AI, storage, and streaming and empowers a fast, secure, and decentralized future.
Which part of the AIOZ Network infrastructure excites you the most and why?
All four infrastructure products, as well as the AIOZ Blockchain, the AIOZ DePIN, our AIOZ bridge, the wallet extension, and all upcoming dApps we have yet to unveil, have taken considerable time and effort, and all of them excite me in different ways, as they all look to solve issues and add value.
That being said, W3AI represents a significant shift in AI resource allocations and model incentivisation and is poised to change the game for the monetization of AI Models and empowerment of AI ecosystem stakeholders.
I feel that the W3AI Marketplace is going to surprise a LOT of people, and for that reason, I will say W3AI!
What does the term "DePIN" mean to you?
DePIN for AIOZ Network is the community of Nodes that powers the entire AIOZ ecosystem.
How important is DePIN for the future of AI in particular?
The AI of 2024 is facing an acute industry GPU shortage.
Countries and companies are racing to develop AI solutions at the state level to private enterprise solutions, thus causing a leap in demand for GPUs.
DePIN for AI enables AIOZ Network to address the problem statement by incentivizing nodes, empowering AI Stakeholders' ecosystem, and meeting the current AI needs.
How does AIOZ Network position itself within the web3 landscape?
The long-term vision of AIOZ Network is to establish itself as the premier infrastructure for dApps.
We're building a comprehensive set of features and capabilities and aiming to provide everything necessary for dApps to run and host their content seamlessly.
We're currently being referred to as the "AWS of Blockchain," which makes sense and is easy to visualize - AI computing, storage, and streaming as industries are all experiencing tremendous growth and innovation, we plan to be at the center of that growth, offering affordable and easy to access solutions.
What do you consider the biggest barriers to adoption of web3 applications and services?
The challenge is the web3 user experience for a status quo web2 internet.
As the landscape broadens, UX/UI must keep up and go beyond what is currently available to users; this is what I believe is one of the biggest challenges in the web3 industry.
What would you like to see happen the most in this industry in the next 2 years?
Web3 technology will continue to be a catalyst for the evolution of Internet 3.0. Blockchain is constantly maturing with more real-world use cases, and A.I. is the game changer for our industry, so I'm excited for all things A.I. across the landscape.
Internally, we have a lot of releases still to be unveiled at AIOZ Network that are still being kept as a surprise, so we are excited about those too!
Thank you, Erman!
Having kicked off 2024 with the launch of W3S and several more feature and product rollouts on the way in Q1, we're excited to be in the middle of an explosion of innovation in AI and DePIN.
Stay tuned for more team interviews in the coming weeks!
About the AIOZ Network
AIOZ Network is a DePIN for Web3 AI, Storage and Streaming.
AIOZ empowers a fast, secure and decentralized future.
Powered by a global network of DePINs, AIOZ rewards you for sharing your computational resources for storing, transcoding, and streaming digital media content and powering decentralized AI computation.
