• NEAR Foundation launches AI Incubation Program to develop user-owned AI solutions and infrastructure.
• Six top-tier AI teams selected to innovate in the AI x Web3 ecosystem on NEAR.

With great pleasure, the NEAR Foundation announces the six AI teams chosen for the inaugural NEAR Horizon AI Incubation Program, which began earlier this month.

Through collaboration with elite AI teams constructing at the nexus of AI and Web3, the NEAR ecosystem will help to build the infrastructure—base models, model training, and developer tools—that enables safe, scalable, and efficient user-owned AI.

Strategic Vision for User-Owned AI

The NEAR AI x HZN Incubation Program is a component of the strategic plan of the NEAR Foundation to create a user-owned AI ecosystem that offers substitutes for the corporate-owned, centralized AI that now dominates the market.

Maximizing the advantages of AI for individuals and communities, creating new economic prospects, and accelerating creativity and innovation are the objectives of putting the power of AI where it belongs—in the hands of users.

Six forward-thinking teams make up the inaugural NEAR AI x HZN Incubator cohort. While Pond is analyzing on-chain data and predicting actions with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), Mizu is creating an open data layer to promote cooperation among AI developers.

Nevermined specializes in building a strong payment system for AI-commerce. Hyperbolic helps projects needing processing resources for demanding jobs by offering an open-access AI cloud with a GPU marketplace and inference services.

While Exabits provides high-performance computing resources for critical AI training and tasks, Ringfence enables artists to safely commercialize their work.

Welcoming Innovation

“We’re excited to welcome these six elite AI teams to the User-Owned AI ecosystem on NEAR,” says NEAR Foundation CEO and co-founder Illia Polosukhin. He added:

“These projects span data, models, compute, and inference; they are pioneering in important areas of the developing AI stack and represent the best of AI x Web3 projects developing today.”

The AI incubation program contributes to a bigger vision of a cooperative and user-owned AI ecosystem, not only individual project development. where academics contributing to open source as well as end users can obtain cutting-edge AI solutions that are safe, distributed, and empowering.

Assuring that development is shared throughout the User-Owned AI ecosystem and promoting a community-driven approach to AI development, each participating team will add to the expanding NEAR AI x Web3 infrastructure product stack.

Over the first twelve weeks of the program and in later phases through May 2025, participants in the NEAR AI x HZN Incubator will get considerable support. That assistance covers access to compute, funding possibilities, specialized technical and token launch assistance, and the AI expert network of NEAR.

Meanwhile, CoinGecko data show that the price of NEAR at the time of writing is about $5.29, up 0.77% from the previous day. Still, with a decline of 5.50% during the last seven days, it indicates a bearish stance.

Early this month, CNF previously reported on the increase in AI-based tokens, such as Render (RNDR) and NEAR, suggesting resurgent investor interest in the AI space.