Kong Jianping, founder of Nanotechnology: There are 3 conditions to guide users to switch to Web 3.0

At present, the metaverse faces two types of problems: first, there are too many platform shortcomings, which limit the growth of the number of users; The second is in terms of infrastructure, that is, there are challenges in terms of concurrency and usage costs. Looking ahead to the next three years, I expect major breakthroughs as well as user development.

Kong Jianping, founder of Nano Labs and director of Hong Kong Cyberport Management Limited.

"Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came to China in 2015, when the term Web 3.0 hadn't come out, and we talked about what the next generation of the internet would look like, with a focus on AI and blockchain." Recently, Kong Jianping, founder of Nano Labs Limited and director of Hong Kong Cyberport Management Co., Ltd., recalled in an exclusive interview with The Paper (www.thepaper.cn).

Today, "the influence of artificial intelligence needs no words, especially the rapid development in the past six months." In Kong Jianping's view, artificial intelligence plus blockchain is the real next generation of the Internet, because artificial intelligence and blockchain are both hugely transformative technologies. At the same time, with the development of AI productivity, entities in the real world can expand infinitely in the metaverse. However, at present, the metaverse faces two types of problems: first, there are too many platform shortcomings, which limit the growth of the number of users; The second is in terms of infrastructure, that is, there are challenges in terms of concurrency and usage costs.

In the interview, Kong Jianping has always emphasized how to promote the development of the metaverse and Web 3.0 from the infrastructure perspective. For the past ten years, he has been continuing to start a business on the Web 3.0 track. After graduating from university, he worked in the semiconductor industry, and after coming into contact with digital currency in 2012, he began to devote himself to this field, first investing in Canaan Technology, a chip design company in the digital currency field, and serving as the company's co-chairman, and then investing in the "ninth city" listed on the US stock market to help it transform into the blockchain industry. Last year, Zhejiang Mowei Technology Co., Ltd., which he founded, was listed on the U.S. stock market.

From "barrel theory" to "longboard lengthening"

The Paper: When it comes to the definition of Web 3.0, people will interpret it in the order from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0, for example: Web 1.0 is read-only, Web 2.0 is read + write, and Web 3.0 is read + write + own. The definition you once gave is "Web 3.0 is artificial intelligence plus blockchain", can you explain it from your point of view?

Kong Jianping: The origin of this topic can be traced back to 2015. At the time, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was also chairman of YC (Y Combinator). Sam came to China in 2015, when the term Web 3.0 hadn't yet appeared, and we talked about what the next generation of the internet would look like, with a focus on artificial intelligence and blockchain. For our industry, Web 3.0 in the narrow sense may refer to blockchain, but I think more people will understand it as the next generation of the Internet.

I firmly believe that the next generation of the Internet will definitely build an artificial intelligence network based on blockchain, and artificial intelligence plus blockchain is the real next generation of Internet, because artificial intelligence and blockchain are both hugely transformative technologies. Among them, the influence of artificial intelligence needs no words, especially the rapid development in the past six months. This shows that it can greatly increase the productivity of users, which is why the development can be so rapid.

Then, why mention blockchain? Because we realize that the development of the Web 2.0 generation of Internet companies needs to conform to the principle of "barrel theory", that is, if you want to start a company, you need to constantly make up for the shortcomings, so in order to make up for the shortcomings, the company needs more and more employees. Or rely on the ecology of a large company, and need to integrate into the ecology of a large company to survive better.

However, for the next generation of the Internet, we believe that this is a long-board stretching process, that is, companies with a few people can survive and thrive. Companies with a few people are common in the Web 3.0 space. On the track of Web 3.0, we can see that companies with only 10 people can also obtain a valuation of hundreds of millions of dollars, and a company with 100 people can also reach a valuation of tens of billions of dollars. This was almost impossible in the previous generation of the Internet era. Since the underlying infrastructure of the blockchain is well established, you can build your business on top of all these public facilities. You just need to do what you're good at to have a good development.

The Paper: What made you decide All In Web 3.0?

Kong Jianping: At that time, I saw that the innovation of the underlying technology of Web 3.0 has indeed improved significantly compared with the traditional model. At the same time, we observe that this longboard lengthening ecological development method may develop faster than the past model. Because it lowers the threshold for entrepreneurship, more people can start businesses here, releasing greater entrepreneurial value and user network effects.

The Paper: Tell us more about the main direction of your investment.

Kong Jianping: Our main focus is on the infrastructure of Web 3.0, and we think there are still many opportunities in this area.

At the beginning, Canaan Technology mainly made bitcoin computing chips, and did not get involved in Ethereum's computing chips at that time, in fact, I think this is a field that should be entered. And it's not just Ethereum, we're also looking at the development of the entire computing network, which is a valuable direction because we think there could be several major changes in computing.

First, chips may evolve toward integrated circuits (ASICs) for specialized applications. In fact, this has already been confirmed in the blockchain space, and we expect similar changes in the field of artificial intelligence.

Second, the entire cloud computing is likely to undergo a shift from CPUs to GPUs to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The reason is that whether it is artificial intelligence or the metaverse, GPUs are required for computing, so the entire cloud computing architecture will be rebuilt.

Coupled with the underlying thinking logic and method of blockchain, we think that there will be many things that can be done and things that can be subverted in this field, so we chose to participate in this field. Our company will include the chip hardware section and the computing network section, and release more technology-based products and platforms around the Web 3.0 metaverse ecosystem.

More low-level work needs to be done

The Paper: What should the metaverse look like in your eyes?

Kong Jianping: Everyone is talking about the metaverse, and in my case, I think its form can be roughly divided into three types: one is the digital twin, that is, the real world is copied in the metaverse; the second is the combination of virtual and real reality, augmented reality (AR); The third is digital native, that is, independently producing some worlds in the metaverse that do not exist in the real world.

In the past year or two, we have seen large manufacturers at home and abroad, as well as governments, working together to promote the development of the metaverse, but truly disruptive and revolutionary products have not yet appeared. The reason is that the development of the meta-universe is still in a barrel theory stage, subject to the existence of some shortcomings, such as the number of VR (virtual reality) devices, the demand for computing power performance, and the computing power network and other aspects of bottlenecks. These factors have led to the inability to grow rapidly in the number of users and the barrier to entry being too high.

Therefore, we believe that to truly realize the development of the metaverse, it may be necessary to do more work at the bottom level, such as solving large-scale computing concurrency problems. Our goal is to allow a large number of users to enter the metaverse at the same time without feeling stuttered, while reducing the operating costs of the metaverse. Otherwise, if startups consume too many computing resources, they may not be able to afford this cost. This is the part of the bottom that needs to be changed.

At the same time, the entrance also needs to be changed. I think we need to form a strong demand and stickiness among young people, and then gradually expand the audience. In general, younger crowds and new scenarios are more receptive to new technologies. For example, Alipay was initially used by young people in a new e-commerce environment, and Alipay at that time did not have various offline payment scenarios. At that time, the scale of the user group was not large enough, and it was impossible to pay for offline scenarios. In addition, the foundation of the network at that time was also a limiting factor. So I think the development direction of the metaverse should be to dig out some potential points in new scenarios. From the underlying infrastructure to the user portal, changes need to be made accordingly.

The Paper: Following the above, you once mentioned: "Now many people may try to move the traditional world to the metaverse, this is stock thinking, but I think there will be more native metaverse innovation", can you elaborate on what "native metaverse innovation" will be?

Kong Jianping: For example, migrating the real world to the metaverse is the same as the logic of thinking that we predicted when computers were invented that only 5 computers were needed in the world, and this mode of thinking is limited. With the development of AI productivity, entities in the real world can expand infinitely in the metaverse. For example, in the real world, each individual has only one self, but in the metaverse, each individual may have an infinite number of selves, existing in the form of avatars (avatars).

There are now applications that allow AI to talk to each other, even without human operations, which was unimaginable in the past world. In this case, your doppelganger and mine can communicate in the metaverse. People need to sleep at night, but doppelgangers in the metaverse don't.

Human knowledge density is limited, but AI like ChatGPT has taken human knowledge density to a higher level. It is impossible for ordinary people to have their knowledge density. If you combine elements of the original world and ChatGPT in the metaverse, then you will definitely create far more things in the metaverse than you would in the real world.

The Paper: When people talk about the meta-universe, they will mention the word "distributed computing power", and when Momicro Technology mentions iPollo (Haowei Technology's Web 3.0 brand), it always mentions distributed rendering computing power, so what is distributed rendering computing power and what is the difference from distributed computing power?

Kong Jianping: Our positioning has two layers, one is the bottom layer, that is, to solve the problem of how to use computing power at a lower cost, and to make better use of idle computing power, because the metaverse and artificial intelligence are inseparable from computing power. Our goal is to enable people to use computing power at a lower cost on a global scale to solve the problems of artificial intelligence computing and metaverse computing.

The second goal is to use the longboard lengthening logic of Web 3.0 to make the various technologies on the iPollo platform Layer 2 layers, that is, each other as infrastructure. For example, when an innovative young person designs a 3D model, he can first generate the model using OpenAI and Stable Diffusion technology. He can then tap directly into Web 3.0 and give the model vitality or artificial intelligence capabilities. He can also plug in an AR camera to let the model interact with augmented reality in the real world. Similarly, this model can also enter the metaverse developed by a project and become a prop or protagonist. In this way, even a one-person team can start a business in the metaverse ecosystem, and the number of teams is not a necessary condition.

The Paper: iPollo Pineapple Metaverse (the elastic computing power network of Nanotechnology, which provides metaverse rendering computing power services) completed large-scale real-time rendering verification of 15,000 digital humans in December 2022, and also established the first metaverse 3D printing center.

Kong Jianping: In the past, we found that many metaverse projects had performance issues when facing dozens to hundreds of concurrent users. Another problem is that these projects are very expensive to run per hour. In order to solve these problems, we successfully solved the concurrency problem of 15,000 people and other concurrency problems from a technical point of view. iPollo's goal is to reduce operating costs by a factor of 100 and achieve this through real-time computing.

Optimizing compute resource scheduling only reduces costs at the first level. However, if the computational cost of the entire network is to be reduced by a factor of 100, it may be necessary to deconstruct the calculation methods and methods in higher dimensions. Users are then allowed to operate on this new set of calculations and methods, which will be less costly than using computing resources directly.

We decided to establish a metaverse 3D printing center mainly because we foresee that the number of metaverse assets will increase in the future, which will bring a lot of printing demand. However, the existing printing equipment and technology around the world cannot meet these needs, so we chose to cooperate with printer manufacturers to build this 3D printing center that transforms virtual worlds into reality.

With the development of artificial intelligence technology, artificial intelligence can now assist in the generation of 3D models, and more refined 3D models may be generated in the future. In a few years, what people need may no longer be an ordinary figure, because it is static. What you need will be a digital hipster that you like, with various AI features behind it, that can interact with you, and that will become part of your emotional life.

Therefore, we believe that these problems need to be addressed at the infrastructure level.

The Paper: You mentioned some earlier, but I still hope you can summarize it. In today's AI popularity, the popularity of the meta-universe seems to have cooled down compared to a year ago, what problems do you think still exist in the current development of the meta-universe? What are the prospects?

Kong Jianping: In my opinion, the current problems facing the metaverse can be roughly divided into two categories. The first category is that the platform has too many shortcomings, which limits the growth of its user number; The second type of problem is infrastructure challenges, that is, concurrency and usage costs. Nevertheless, I believe we are all actively addressing these issues. Looking ahead to the next three years, I expect major breakthroughs as well as user development.

The four phases of Web 3.0

The Paper: You mentioned the development stage of Web 3.0 in your previous lecture to students, can you expand and share it here?

Kong Jianping: For the development of the Web 3.0 industry, I think there are four stages.

The first phase is the Bitcoin-led blockchain phase, where there may only be 5 to 10 areas in which the industry can participate.

The second stage is the era of financial applications led by Ethereum. This stage not only includes the previous mining machines, mining transactions, chips and other fields, but also covers a variety of new applications, so the areas that developers can participate in may expand to hundreds or thousands. There may be hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial teams in this ecosystem, including related teams in a broad sense, of which tens of thousands may be truly deeply involved.

The third stage is the era of native Web 3.0.

The fourth stage is the industrial Web 3.0 era. I divide it into native Web 3.0 and industrial Web 3.0 because once a concept is hot, many enterprises with resources want to join and consider how to combine. However, native players and industry players are different groups, and they often cannot reach a consensus. The industry believes that there is no value in technology that is not integrated with the industry, while the native side believes that it has done a good job, and the industry cannot be well integrated. In fact, neither side is wrong, just looking at things from their own perspective. When the number of users is small, only native gameplay can be promoted. Only when the number of users reaches a certain scale, such as 1 billion or 2 billion, can the industry be more easily combined and promoted on a large scale. Therefore, I divided it into these 4 stages, the first two stages are more financial, and the last two stages are more technology.

The Paper: What stage are we at now?

Kong Jianping: I think the current situation is that the second phase is dominant, and the native Web 3.0 is gradually emerging. There are attempts to integrate, but it's not easy to form large-scale use cases. Like previous NFT (non-fungible token) offerings, it can exist as a marketing material, but it may be relatively weak in terms of sustainability. And overseas native NFTs, despite some ups and downs, the entire track continues to exist.

The Paper: So many people are doing the popularization of Web 3.0, and more people need to understand and participate in Web 3.0.

Kong Jianping: It's a question of user conversion. User conversion requires certain prerequisites. Everyone wants to guide users from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, which is not determined by one person or one project, but by an industry dividend. There may be several scenarios for this industry dividend.

One is the wealth effect. People invest in stocks and cryptocurrencies because they see others making money, and this wealth effect attracts people to convert. This is one aspect, such as the current bear market, a lot of publicity is useless. When market conditions are good, they will naturally participate, and this is the transformation of wealth effect.

The second category is to improve user efficiency, such as ChatGPT can improve user efficiency 100 times, but also promote user conversion.

The third category is a significant reduction in usage costs, which can also promote user conversion. I think user conversion must meet at least 1 of these 3 conditions, not just because you have a user.

The Paper: The Three Laws of the Metaverse you mentioned before, can you share them here?

Kong Jianping: The "Three Laws of the Metaverse" I wrote in 2021 is just my own thoughts, and I hope to communicate with you more. My thinking is, for example, that in the past the Internet had three laws. If we regard the era of the industrial revolution as a two-dimensional space, the Internet era as a three-dimensional space, and the future metaverse era as a four-dimensional space, you will find a characteristic that the higher the dimension, the faster its development.

In the era of the Industrial Revolution, it took decades for a company to grow into a unicorn. In the Internet era, the development time is shortened to more than ten years, and in the mobile Internet era, it only takes a few years. Now in this metaverse era, it may only take a few months for a company to grow. Therefore, I feel that with the improvement of dimensions, the speed of development has changed dramatically.

Among them, the first point is that the value of the metaverse is proportional to the third square of the number of users. In the Internet era, user value is proportional to the square of the number of users, but I think in the higher-dimensional metaverse, it is at least proportional to the third square of the number of users, which should be the network effect of the industry.

The second point is that the network value of the metaverse is the sum of the values of each layer. In the past Web 2.0 era, enterprises were in a competitive monopoly relationship, and all parties were relatively closed; while the Web 3.0 metaverse was more of an open relationship, so at the level of the meta-universe, the value should be the sum of the network values of each layer, rather than a competitive relationship.

The third point is that marginal users of the metaverse can also get corresponding value, in the past you may be a user of Taobao, you shop on Taobao, or you buy .com domain names, but you cannot enjoy the dividends of the growth of these companies.

However, now that you have purchased a product such as BAYC (an NFT brand called "Bored Ape"), as one of the first digital e-commerce consumers, the project party also airdrops tokens to you. In this case, every user can enjoy an increase in the value of the network, which did not exist in the past. So, based on these views, I think there are three laws above. Everyone is welcome to shoot bricks.

(Curiousjoe, a crossover researcher on international politics and cryptocurrencies.) ）

The "Metaverse Observation" column has long paid attention to the topic of Web 3.0, and welcomes contributions from builders, researchers, and imaginaries in related industries, and observations, comments, and interviews are available. Submission channel: [email protected]