The Future of Tech Is Self-Writing

Transcript

Now we are on to the next inspiring keynote. Um actually two days ago was the fourth anniversary of the world computer summit and Zurich was buzzing with uh the defininity crowd. There was over 1,000 people uh coming from global uh hubs of um the internet computer and it was a very very exciting event. So now we are really happy to have Dominic the founder and chief scientist of the Defin Foundation here with us. Um he will give us his vision of the future.

Thank you. So um just a few we may take a few minutes because our internet connection is not working. Um it's kind of thing that always happens when you got a demo, right? Should be the complex stuff that fails. um hopefully sort of. So while that's um happening uh how many of you here know what the self-running internet is or have heard about that concept? Okay, a few at least. So, um, who have you, um, when you hear the word built on blockchain XYZ,

like who have you like distinguish when you hear the word onchain between something running on a blockchain and maybe running on Amazon Web Services and having a token? Like who would amongst the audience? Okay, here's another way of asking it. amongst the audience. Um, do you feel the word onchain is primarily used in conjunction with services running on Amazon? Thanks. And a token having an associated token or we'll have two different rounds of voting or do you feel the expression onchain is primarily associated with a service running fully on on the blockchain on the network. So there are

two choices. When you hear the word onchain, do you associate that with running on Amazon Web Services or some other, you know, big tech cloud and then having an associated token? That's choice one. Or choice two, when you hear the expression on chain, do you think, well, that means running on a blockchain? So, who here thinks about it as option one? Okay. Who here thinks about as option two? Okay, that's very interesting. So, I'll tell you this, and you're probably not going to believe me. You had to do your own research, but um outside of the internet computer ecosystem, there is no blockchain in the world that can run even a simple app on the network itself.

So when you hear Coinbase for example saying onchain's the new online what they mean is that um you know people are building if you build something any anything that's built that has an associated token is on chain it doesn't mean running on the network. So there's not a single blockchain in existence outside uh the realm of the internet computer that can store a phone photo. So even when you have an NFT that's not on the blockchain. The blockchains on typically Amazon S3 has been a few cases where people forgot to refresh the credit card and the NFT collection disappeared and you've just got to link to that NFT on the blockchain. That's universally how it

works. So um it was very interesting because you know our our kind of research shows yeah that 95% of people actually maybe have this misunderstanding that onchain means something's running on a blockchain right like here's a service running on blockchain XYZ and in excess of 95% of people in the industry understand that is that it's actually running on chain right but what it really means is it's running on Amazon web services fully under the control of a developer where it can be hacked and um there's it's just got an associated token. So, you know, you guys just reflect the, you know, the broader industry and and the misunderstanding. So, what I'm going to show you today anyway is um uh you're going to go for two leaps. One leap is

actually you're going to see something that's running from a blockchain and understand that because there's a big difference between something running on Amazon web services with a token and something actually running um really running off a network entirely. and you're going to see something new called the um self-writing internet. So, um how many of you uh have heard about AI smart contracts? Okay. So, how many of you are aware that there's only one network that actually can run AI models on chain? It's the internet computer.

Okay, a few. But it's kind of like you know that that's also the case like if you can't store just just think of this. If there's not a single blockchain in existence that can store a phone photo, something a photo you took with your phone like five meg or something. Of course, you can't run an AI model, right? Because to run an AI model, um, you have to do a lot of computation and the weights obviously, you know, minimally tens of gigabytes for a small large language model. And and if you want to run a big one, it's going to be in the hundreds of megabytes or at least 70 gig. Okay, so um, okay, we've got this this thing working. So, I'm going to run you through super quick. So, we haven't got much time. Um, caffeine is a platform that enables a self-riting

internet. So, um, you know, there are a lot of leaps here. The first leap you need to understand is that there are two kinds of blockchain. There are the ones outside of the internet ecosystem that process tokens and that's all they do. And the word onchain is very deliberate. It's kind of misleading. It's like industry marketing, right? Um, sue me if I'm lying to you, but I'm telling you the truth and you can do your research. And so like you know as per the rest of the industry 95% of the people and 95% of you here are unaware of that but um the first leap you got to make in understanding is that um you know you can there is one blockchain where you can actually use it as a tech stack and build um fully fully on chain really on chain right and there's another thing

coming like you know internet computer projects benefited from more than $500 million of of R&D so when you look at a lot of projects like in zoo and so on find their disc shell companies. There's no one there. If you head down, go downtown in Zurich, you'll see uh sevenstory building, defininity headquarters, and and that's where the R&D is happening. So now the next phase of blockchain, if what's really happening is that you'll be able to talk to the internet in the sense that a blockchain, a decentralized blockchain network is the internet, and you'll be able to um quite literally create stuff by talking. So, I'm going to whisk through this. Um, if this works. So,

Steve Jobs talked about tools and people doing wonderful things with them. The question is, what if anybody could create apps and services, online apps and services, just by talking, and this isn't vibe coding. Um, and that they were sophisticated and they were secure and they're updatable. And they really ran on a self-riting internet on a blockchain. Um, and where are we going? The answer is there are only 35,000 web3 engineers in the world. Um there are 15 million full stack engineers worldwide.

Um but once you give people access to the self-running internet, anyone with a smartphone, there about five billion people with internet connected smartphones in the world. Anyone who can speak a natural language, you don't even have to type. As long as you can speak, that's enough. You can basically develop stuff just by talking and everyone will become a builder. Everybody will be able to create all kinds of internet functionality pretty much whatever they want. So we won't spend too long. I haven't got much time. It's better just to get to a demo. But there's a lot of things you can create. There's it's infinite. Um what's interesting particularly I think is in the in the personal in the context of personal apps you can create new kinds of uh online

service and pioneer new kinds of online paradigms. So, for example, you could create a hyper local social network for your family which has special rules. Maybe there's like a shared photo gallery where you can you you can add giant emojis to photos and things like that. Um, maybe you can create an esports system where you can compete for Bitcoin with your friends. Um, enterprise is going to see huge changes. Uh, you'll be able to get enterprise systems for like 1% of the cost, 1% of the time to market. And because you're building on a blockchain, you'll benefit from the sovereignty and resilience and security only decentralized systems can can provide. So, you're going to see this in a second. Um, Internet Computer, if you're wondering, it's a sovereign network. Are you most of you aware that outside of Bitcoin, most blockchains run

on big tech clouds? Like they're just cloud instances. That's what the network nodes are. Okay. So Bitcoin like Satoshi is very keen on this like it's a network created by sovereign hardware and there are all kinds of benefits to that. uh the other network that the only other network that does this is the internet computer and it actually runs on a network of uh special devices called no machines in the same way bitcoin's created by hashing devices and these are run by independent people around the world parties called node providers and they're combined by internet computer protocol which is a mathematically secure protocol to create a kind of cloud a revolutionary cloud environment that's serless and we'll get to that um and it's essentially running a new kind of smart contracts And what's

interesting within the context of this demo and what you're going to see today is we've been working on making this environment a cloud for AI. So we've um been adding technologies and developing technologies that enables AI to build much more productively than it can for example on web 2 platforms. So uh what happens? How is this going to work? What you're about to see um quite literally it's conversational fully conversational. This isn't vibe coding. It's self-riting. So you you talk to the AI um it writes the underlying software for you um deploys it and out comes the app and the app is just on a URL. You get a URL but that URL is coming off a blockchain and you can just refresh that

URL to see the app. You can keep on talking and it'll be updated and you can refresh the app and there's your updated functionality. Um and when AI codes and built solo, which is what uh self this this platform and and the underlying self-writing internet technologies uh make possible, um you basically have self-writing apps. Um and and the distinction of course is that with self-writing there is no human in the loop. Um you're creating production apps in different kinds of context. Um and you can imagine this is a crypto technology is based on math. So there are technologies that um ensure that for example when the AI updates an app or a

service AI makes mistakes all the time right everyone knows that and but when the AI makes a mistake there are guardrails mathematical guardrails it's in fact not able to update uh apps and services in ways that would cause data loss. Um so that gives you an idea of the ways that you know um crypto technology being appi is being applied here. So in the future, you know, the internet will write itself. Um, you know, you in just a few years, nobody's going to think uh in the main with a few exceptions, people will think of texts. Uh, people will think of self-writing platforms as texts. So when you think of a text stack, you won't be thinking, well, I'm going to get Amazon Web Services, I'm going to get Postgres, I'm going to get

Tomcat Java server, all this kind of stuff. You know, think like that. You'll be thinking, right, where's where's my um self-writing stack? That's what you'll think of as the stack. And you'll for the vast majority of cases just talk to AI in a conversational way and create what you want. Okay, so um demo. Let's see. So, how could this go wrong? How much time have I got? Four minutes. Okay, long. So, um it's actually a mobile first paradigm, but you know, there's not time to hook up a um hook up a phone, but I'll squeeze that browser to show you what happens.

Um you might notice this empty app, which has not been used before, looks like a bit like WhatsApp or Signal or something like that. It's a like a chat app, right? And that's because in the future, the development of uh uh you know, apps and services on the internet is going to be conversational. you're going to speak to the internet and all of your development will be conversational. So, let's create a new uh project and uh I'll create something very simple to begin with. Create I mean we're going to get much more complex, don't worry. Create a bit Bitcoin web page. Now, um this is deliberately absurdly simple, but I want to just give you some orientation. So, um oh gosh,

I'll just say no. Whatever. I'll just give you a quick. So, uh, [Laughter] it's too simple. Um, no, just Oh god, wasteless keyboard. Create a web page with a Bitcoin symbol. We're going to do something complex in a second. We're going to waste time doing this. Um, go on, just do it. Thank you. So, we're now in the chat and now you see it's writing a spec. So this is the self-writing paradigm. We're not writing the spec.

It's writing the spec. Obviously, as we keep on talking, the spec will get updated, but our interface is just the AI. Um, hopefully this will be done soon. It's going to write the code and then it's going to deploy it to the internet computer and then you're going to see that the the code thing is going to move to the draft thing and you're going to see the thing. Um, you're going to see it. So you're going to see it hopefully appear here, but then I'll show you it's on a URL. So you can add your own URL. You can create stuff. Um and obviously if you're use this is just a draft or creating but if you're um doing something in production you know you give it a proper domain name right um and uh actually you know you you you you can push um

drafts in into there you go okay and just so I'm going to click on this link just to show you so it's it's actually on a URL right as a separate there you go all right Okay, but this is very simple. Look, I think what's interesting about this though is that the whole thing is being served from the internet computer. There's actually even some Okay, the backend code is the stuff that runs on the internet computer is empty because of course all it's doing is serving a page with a bitcoin on it. So, let's create another project. Um, and this will be okay. Create a website for a crypto conference.

Whoops. That's criy this keyword starts on the 5th of June and runs for two days. Um, there are two stages. We're going to be vague because we're going to update this because this is you just keep on talking, but we're going to give it something reasonable to start off with. There are two stages. Um, uh, uh, there are two stages. uh make it possible to register speakers.

Um make it possible to assign time slots on the stages and assign speakers to Jesus. Sorry for the speakers to the time slots. Let's just go get that going. That's enough for now. Right. So um this will obviously be um don't ask me a question. Just do it. This AI is very it's conversational. I did a demo actually.

It was very funny. The first one two days ago you can hear my voice is a bit croaky. It's been a busy few days. But I did the demo and we built something quite complex. I had more time. when I was doing like I actually created five apps in parallel to show quite the level of productivity you can get and um uh it was a tennis co it was like a an app for tennis bookings for a tennis coach I said where's this feature I told you to do this thing and it answered back I actually added this feature and I logged out as admin log back in and there it was but um so you can actually see I mean down the side if you're not used to this kind of thing it's that's like a kind of like zoomed out view of the code that it's

writing it's writing a lot of code. Um you as a human being if you're an engineer it will take a very long time to write all this. And what's interesting though is um with the inference optimization technologies coming down the pipe. This this whole thing will take a few seconds um you know the productivity is really incredible. While this is doing let's create another one another one running in parallel. Whoops. Create a crypto portfolio tracker. It should Whoops, excuse me. Be possible to add assets by ticker symbol.

Pull the prices from Whoops, excuse me. From the Binance. Did I spelled that right? Binance API. Let's do that. So, um, that'll keep going. And then with our crypto conference website, I store in the front end back end, by the way, is this one, MCO. So, if you look at this, this is using something called enhanced orthogonal persistence. It's actually a revolution within a revolution on the internet computer. We collapsed the with this new code. It's a language designed for AI.

So it's a language designed to enable AI to program in a much more productive way than it can do with kind of web two technologies. And uh you'll notice there's no file there. There are no files. There's no database access. One of the things we did is a lot of work. We collapsed the difference between um data and logic. So the data lives in the logic. And this is very important because it simplifies um backend logic and it makes it possible to it's one of the technologies that enable us to prevent data loss. So when you create a new version of an app, the AI has to specify how you migrate the logic which contains the data and that enables us to do various things that ensure it's not it's actually not possible to lose data.

So this is the back end language is called MCO. Um, and uh, yeah, it's actually able to write it actually behind caffeine. It's not just one AI. There's an ensemble of AIS. Um, and the back end stuff comes out incredibly quick. Naturally, it's been like fine-tuned on. So, okay, it's fiddling around with some front end stuff. So, this thing's going okay, writing some stuff, too. So, it's going chugga chugga. But, you know, I think what's important to see while it's still working is just the sheer volume of software this stuff's able to produce. Of course, if you're using this in your own life as a, you know, personal life or entrepreneurial life or

business life, whatever it is, you wouldn't just be doing this in a couple of interactions like we're doing here. It's it's a conversation. And that's why it looks like a chat app. In the future, every project's just a conversation. You talk to the AI and have a conversation and you'll build stuff and you'll ask it to add features and fix things and um improve things and things things will evolve. Oh, it's done it. Oh, cool. Thanks. Yeah, cool. So, this one. Okay, let's just bring it just to prove it exists outside of the environment. Okay, add asset. Let's do Bitcoin because that's the obvious one. How many have I got? 100. Yeah, I wish.

Okay, there you go. All right, so IP and this is very simple. So, we're going to go back to the I say 10,000. Yeah. Um, okay. It's got the ICP price, etc. You can see how this goes, right? So, with um um so this is kind of easy. What What other feature might there be? um time. All right, let's just switch back and see if it's done our website for the Okay, crypto conference.

Okay, so just quickly to hope to log in, you're going to see uh internet identity demo. Gosh. Tada. Okay. So, now I'm in and there's an admin panel is there. Okay. So, I can add a speaker, add myself. Oops. I'm not going to worry about spelling mistakes, which is hard for me. Um, [Music] okay.

So there's me added as I mean you can see this how it's going to go around and registered as a speaker. I can create time slots. It's fully featured. Um we could be adding like attendee registration. We can do panels. Um it's already got that. You can assign multiple speakers to slots. Um pretty much you could uh engineer something better than the Crypto Valley conference website. I'd probably say without any technical skills half an hour, right? And of course, it'll be running on blockchain, which means that what are the advantages of blockchain?

Tamperproof, immune to traditional cyber attacks. You don't need a firewall or anti- intrusion software or anti-malware. Um, so it's tamperproof. It's unstoppable. Obviously, in this case, it's not autonomous because we we're deliberately maintaining control. It's a conference, right? Um, if you wanted very simple with internet computers, uh, multi-chain capabilities, you could accept, you could charge people Bitcoin to attend. You could have that functionality. Um, but I'm out of time, so hopefully you enjoyed that. Thanks. [Applause]