Can practicing speaking also earn you Airdrop for free? Detailed explanation of the AI voice input project Poseidon led by a16z.

Author: Umbrella, Deep Tide TechFlow

In recent days, a wave of practicing spoken language has swept through the crypto community.

An AI voice input project called Poseidon has officially launched, and in the current phase, users can earn points daily through voice input to obtain future airdrop shares.

As a star project incubated by Story Protocol and led by a16z, Poseidon aims to address the current scarcity of high-quality clear AI voice data, dedicated to helping train AI to understand speech in different languages, dialects, and environments.

After experiencing it, the author summarized the background and participation methods of the Poseidon project, which may hide the next opportunity for "zero-cost big profits."

Project Background

According to its official website, the project’s chief scientist Sandeep Chinchali holds a PhD from Stanford and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in edge computing, artificial intelligence, and generative AI.

Sarick Shah, the product manager at Poseidon, previously worked as a software engineer at LotusFlare and Roadz, holding a background from Johns Hopkins University, and was responsible for AI engineering work at Story before joining the Poseidon team.

The project operations manager of the Poseidon project, LJW, previously served as the co-director of the cryptocurrency lab at Harvard University and as a senior researcher at Harvard Business School, possessing extensive experience in AI and Web3 business model operations.

SY Lee, the project leader of the Poseidon project, is also the founder and CEO of Story Protocol. His first startup, Radish, is a mobile serialized novel application with millions of downloads, which he sold to the South Korean tech giant Kakao for $440 million in 2021. He then served as the Global Strategy Officer of Kakao Entertainment and is also a venture partner at Hashed, the largest blockchain fund in South Korea.

Poseidon has gained significant attention thanks in part to the incubation support of its Story Protocol. As an ecosystem focused on on-chain IP, Story Protocol provides immense assistance for Poseidon's future development. Moreover, the relationship between the two is not merely one of incubation; the fact that SY Lee, a co-founder of Story Protocol, personally takes on the role of project leader for Poseidon also underscores its important position within the Story ecosystem.

The financing information released by Poseidon a few days ago has also brought market attention and confidence to this project. The Poseidon team announced on July 23 that its seed round was led by the well-known crypto investment firm a16z, with an amount of 15 million dollars.

Why does a16z value such a voice data collection project?

The answer to this question starts from one of the core challenges facing the current AI industry – usable data. A16z partner Chris Dixon pointed out in Poseidon's research report that the AI industry is facing a bottleneck of "data exhaustion," which is precisely the core problem Poseidon aims to address.

Specifically, the current AI training faces three major data dilemmas:

Data growth is slowing: The current output speed of internet content data is far below the rate at which AI can learn and digest it. A dilemma where AI has no data to learn from may occur in the near future. In 2024, former OpenAI scientist Sutskever pointed out that the growth rate of internet content data is slowing down, and this "fossil fuel" driving AI leaps is gradually depleting.

High-quality data is scarce: Compared to text data, clear multilingual language data is an even more "scarce resource." Higher quality voice content data can enable AI to understand what we express more quickly in voice conversations, thus improving efficiency.

Lack of diversity: The existing voice data materials on the internet are mostly "Mandarin versions", with a serious lack of language data in different dialects, accents, and environments in this field.

Poseidon's solution directly addresses this data demand pain point by incentivizing users to contribute multilingual voice data in real-world scenarios, providing AI models with richer and higher-quality training materials.

This model of "everyone contributes data, everyone earns rewards" not only addresses the data needs of AI companies but also creates opportunities for ordinary users to partake in the dividends of AI development.

Participation Tutorial

Currently, Poseidon has launched a mini-App mall within the World Coin App on mobile, in addition to the web version. Users can add applications and log in within the World Coin App, but this method is more complex compared to the official website participation process. This article will take the web interaction process as an example.

Poseidon official website link

After entering the project official website, complete the registration via email, and currently there is no need to bind a crypto wallet, which is very friendly for new users. The first login requires granting microphone permissions and recognizing a few English words through reading.

After passing, you can enter the main interface of the project. In the left navigation bar, you can select the language you want to input under the "Home" section. Currently, Poseidon supports input in 16 languages including English, Chinese, German, Japanese, etc. The number of participants in English, which has the most participants, has exceeded 24,000 users.

After selecting the language you want to input, you can enter the material reading interface. Click "Start Recording" to begin reading, and after recording for at least 10 seconds, you can click "Submitting" to submit and earn 10 points.

After submitting the recording, it will be reviewed by AI. If the voice review passes, you can additionally obtain 50-250 points.

Points Acquisition Strategy

According to the current points reward display on the Poseidon official website in various languages, the English version, which has the highest number of participants, receives the least points, which is 10 (for submission) + 50 (for approval). Other languages, including Chinese, receive 10 + 250 points. Therefore, for users in the Chinese region, choosing Chinese voice input is both simple and allows for higher points rewards.

It is important to note that the daily recording submission limit is 5 times. By actively interacting (such as submitting high-quality recording content), users can earn a maximum of 20 recording submission times per day.

At the same time, according to the author's tests, if the recording is unclear or a blank recording is submitted, it will not receive the full points reward, and it will also consume the daily submission count.

By accessing the "Profile" interface on the left side of the official website, users can view their points acquisition details and exclusive invitation links.

The "Leader board" interface on the left navigation bar allows you to view the points leaderboard. It can be seen that the current number of participants is not high; I have earned 3985 points through interactions over two days, ranking 435th on the leaderboard. As more users participate, the competition may become increasingly fierce.

Airdrop Expectations

Although Poseidon has not yet announced the token issuance date, its official website shows that points earned through interaction will be converted into rewards or token airdrops once the tokenomics are determined.

With the rapid development of AI in recent years, related crypto projects have emerged one after another. The foundational data for AI is being constantly consumed, and AI urgently needs high-quality voice data from real-world scenarios. This demand has given rise to the Poseidon project.

From the user's perspective, this may be a low-risk, high-potential early opportunity, requiring only an investment of time and voice to obtain future airdrop expectations.