Remember these middle school writing prompts: Describe your favorite cookie.

Your teacher asked you to write it as if to a stranger, a being who had never encountered a cookie before, which meant engaging every sense—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. You may not have realized it at the time, but describing something in a way that allows people to get a clear picture is actually pretty tough.

Let me try to describe Matheus Pagani, Founder and CEO of Venture Miner. Matheus is a man with light caramel skin and dark brown hair. Even though his hair is cut close, you can tell it’s curly. He has a thick dark brown, almost black beard that connects to a mustache. His eyes are dark brown behind thin wire glasses. His bottom lip protrudes slightly further than his top lip, giving him an appearance of assurance, but not arrogance.

Pictured him yet? How sure are you?

Oh yeah, and he’s Brazilian.

Do you have it?

Let’s see what Matheus Pagani actually looks like.

Is that what you had in mind from my description? Doubt it. Every time I told you he was Brazilian, you accessorized him in bright colors and a feathered headdress? Something similar?

If so, check your bias, but also you think like an AI. That’s what Chatgpt came up with from prompt “some Brazilians having fun.” Pagani showed this and other examples spit out by our generative AI (Italians have fun sitting around long tables with multiple generations eating pizza) during the AI2WEB3 Bootcamp in NYC in early December.

The bootcamp, run by Pagani and Build City, brought together 59 participants across all skill levels to learn how the two buzziest (and often misunderstood) technologies can come together to create useful products and services. Pagani used a version of the middle school assignment to explain how and why AI made the significant leaps that have kept us all excited and on edge for the past few years. Before there was pretty much only text data used to train AIS, and as the exercise highlights, it only goes so far. But mix textual information with visual data and you get a fuller picture.

And understanding this, getting hands on with both AI and blockchain technology to understand its core components is what the bootcamp was all about. For Pagani, these skills will be relevant to almost everyone – engineers, tech users, journalists, artists, doctors – really soon.

“We want to join brilliant minds from all backgrounds who come and work with AI and Web3, as the intersection of their multiple perspectives can reveal cases of new uses that we would never imagine just with a specialized Web3 or AI mindset alone ,” Pagani said. “Today, we have tools to easily enable all non-technical enthusiasts to build practically functional applications and systems just with “plain English”, so that what matters brings passionate people interested in solving problems along with the right education. Once you have this combo, just light the match and watch it burn. “

Mindbroling Building

What makes the intersection of these two technologies so exciting is how much you can build in such a short amount of time with really no prior technical experience.

Not only will AI source entire codebases with the right prompt, but the crypto industry is also building tools to help evolve at the intersection of both more intuitive and accessible.

For example Coinbase Sponsored Bootcamp Launched AgentKit in November. The framework allows developers to build AI agents with their own crypto wallets, enabling the agents to interact autonomously with blockchain networks. This can be used to build a group of agents that can monitor the markets and execute trades automatically based on pre-defined rules and hedging frameworks.

“One day we’ll have AI agents owning their own cars and running their own taxi service that gets paid by customers in crypto and then uses that crypto to buy repairs,” Lincoln Murr, associate product manager at Coinbase, told attendees .

Coinbase currently has a grant program that goes into building with AgentKit. “What you build does not have to be useful; We have a bias towards cool things,” Murr told the bootcamp, hoping to inspire projects and applications that no one has thought of yet.

ORA Network also has an interesting model for developers who want to build AI-enabled Web3 applications or vice versa. The network allows developers to use current large language models, including Meta’s LLAMA3 and stable diffusion, but it also allows developers to build their own models and offer a so-called initial model offering (IMO) to crowdfund its continued development.

“It’s kind of winner-take-all right now in AI, but with this model we’re allowing crowdfunding of AI building and training so people can have a piece of the models, which is empowering if we think these models will Run the community for a decade,” said Alec James, Partnerships and Growth Manager at ORA, during the Bootcamp. “If that is the case, we want the development to be distributed.”

Nearby, Fleek and Alora were also among the companies sponsoring the Bootcamp, presenting their various tools and programs for building at the intersection of these two innovative technologies.

Can devs do anything?

During the last day of the bootcamp, nine teams presented working prototypes for projects that mixed Web3 and AI. These projects ranged from AI assistants meant to help you choose gifts, order delivery or diversify your financial portfolio to applications to help crypto operators pump out memecoins with the high virality potential.

Jackie Joya, a participant who flew in from San Francisco, said the boot camp really inspired her to keep building. With a background in animal science, Joya is still new to engineering, but was amazed at how much a beginner could build with the tools available.

Other participants across all skill levels said similar things. Choudhury Imtiaz, a market researcher from Bangladesh who is in the US on an H-1B1 visa awaiting placement, had not heard of Web3 before the Bootcamp, but was able to complete a team project on the last day. And Isayah Culbertson, who has worked as an engineer for both Crypto and AI projects separately, was able to learn skills to build with both, which he believes have the potential to change the world for the better.

“I see the combination accelerating the research and development of so many different fields, while also allowing for a more equitable distribution of wealth generated from this R&D,” he said.