Ambient, a new Web3 project founded by Harvard-educated engineers, is emerging from stealth mode with the promise of fully transforming the way AI accesses and deploys worldwide.
With the help of $7.2 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX), Ambient, along with Delphi Digital and Amber Group, considers it to be an “Openai with AI Bitcoin.” It’s not just a bold claim, it reflects the team’s ambition to rethink AI’s economics, transparency and accessibility from scratch.
AI meets the Proof of Work Blockchain: A New Chapter in Decentralized Intelligence
At its core, ambient is a new kind of blockchain. It freshly blends elements of Solana’s architecture with workplace proof, a system that relies on computational efforts to protect the network. However, instead of simply processing transactions, Ambient uses AI inference validated using its computing power. This means using a layer of transparency to make AI output more accurate and secure.
The project was built to fix what many consider to be an increasing problem in the AI ecosystem. Black box models, lack of privacy, bias, risk of operation. Unlike closed platforms, Ambient’s infrastructure is open and checkable. The team is working towards something bigger, a decentralized in-chain foundation model that can fit or even surpass human-level intelligence because there is no central gatekeeper.
“Ambient directly coordinates the economy of the network with the generation of useful outputs to create a competitor that is focused on closed-source AI, unlike what the market has seen before,” says co-founder Dr. Travis Good.
The technology stack is not a small feat. Ambient supports inference for models with over 600 billion parameters. Thanks to the unique POW design, the system reduces verification overhead to 0.1%, reducing training costs by 10 times compared to current platforms. This approach rewards miners with bitcoin style. This provides a more consistent incentive than a proof stake network that relies on transaction fees.
The company’s founding team is nothing new to solving major technical challenges. Ambient was founded by Travis Good, PhD, who previously developed the world’s first mathematically optimal freight railway movement planner and worked on AI-driven drug discovery and spectroscopy.
Max Lang, CTO of Ambient, is the founder of Serial, with exit under his belt and past roles for Microsoft and Amazon. In addition to helping Labs land their first major customers, Max played a key role in the 1.0 release of Cockroach Labs, leading Vault Health pivot to community testing and expanding it to millions of tests nationwide. The founder’s track record shows that they know how to execute on a large scale.
“Ambient’s talented team has taken a strong opposite approach to tackling the biggest challenges in this field,” said Tommy Shaughnessy, founding partner at Delphi Ventures. “We are delighted to be able to support them as we are uniquely positioned as the tent pole for the upcoming agent economy that seamlessly integrates Web3 and Web2.”
Michael Wu, co-founder and CEO of Amber Group, sees Ambient’s infrastructure as a crypto AI breakthrough.
Ambient’s testnet is scheduled to be released later this year. The launch could mark the start of a new chapter in distributed AI.
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