From community-aligned models to community-owned AGI

Dillon Chen

• 4 min read

Recently we had helped launch the rdatadao.org community on common. If you haven’t seen it. come check out: https://rdatadao.org/

Here’s a short blurb.

r/datadao is a community-owned data collective. Join with your reddit account, add your data, and earn points based on your karma. Use the community dataset as the start of a new, user-owned Reddit, vote to rent the data to other AI companies, or vote to delete it if Reddit agrees to pay you directly.”

Anna and team did a really great job of articulating why this important. And of course, one obvious thought springs to mind on how we should do, given that common.xyz is “shaped like a a set of forums”.

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https://twitter.com/dillchen/status/1775586874834255969

But what should with this dataset beyond the obvious? Maybe community-owned AGI. How would be do that? TW: speculative, but I hope a fun read. Please poke holes!

TLDR: Community-owned AGI in 3 steps:

  1. Doable Today: train a bunch of smaller models using for each imported subreddit -> more tractable in terms of training -> community plays with model -> fast feedback loop
  2. Doable This Cycle: add memecoin incentives -> more money -> more content -> better signal -> bigger models
  3. Doable Within 5 years: create an MoE that’s collectively owned.

Some Background in the World

The world, according to Metaculus, now has a fair shot of having one monolithic, centralized, foundation model released in the near future. Depending on your criteria, that’s 2026 or 2031. That’s a very e/acc. Where individuals or a single party are responsible for this tech.

By building off of the r/datadao, Common, and crypto social stack, I think we have a non-zero shot, at creating a d/acc version of this AGI, where it is collectively, bottoms up owned. Individuals get votes and financial ownership, instead of compute rations.

Step 1 - Doable Today: Provide Immediate Utility with Imported Reddit Data

At this stage, u just have a useful community-aligned model, after all Reddit was a testbed for training data, and social feeds are “RLHF” for us. Here are some reasons why it would be interesting:

  • easy / good data for specific case:
    • bootstrap data with reddit download : via Vana,
  • good reward signal by default provided via Karma: augment with other onchain sources on Common, other networks, and onchain social from Farcaster
  • immediate utility for use case, even if small, by chatting with model, for example:
    • as a user, I’m new to the community and chatting with an LLM is useful,
    • chat with embodiment of community
    • help format posts for better posting in community
  • training tractability: smaller model vs a larger scale foundation model.

And as Common integrates more deeply with Vana Data, what u could get by default :)

Step 2 - This Cycle: Bootstrap More Scale with Incentives–Memecoins to IMOs

At this stage, u should be able to actually have a community, aligned and owned model. Anna wrote a previous post on user-owned foundation models. This is a bit of a riff of that post.

  • Bootstrap new community with a memecoin:
    • memecoins can go from 5k to 150m in a matter of a week. this provides a pool of capital and a wide base of holders who care enough to make content / spread the word.
    • I hope it gets applied to more “serious” usecases.
  • Grab More Data:
    • Use the coin to grab more data, we’re seeing this with DEGEN / ENJOY Tips, and you’ll see more from Common here very shortly.
  • Increase data quality and share rev with a real DAO / IMO:
  • Make it more onchain + verify computation + scale : use Ritual :)
  • Let the model create onchain transactions: could be cool

On Common, as you create a community, it would be cool to automatically get 1) coin and 2) LLM by default.

Step 3 - Within 5 Years: Create an MoE Foundation Model -> Community Owned AGI

At this stage, you would get a community owned MoE. This section is very speculative.

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  • There are interesting results on model merging.
  • By default, because each “community-specific” model is already owned. The creation of any new MoE should automatically share 1) ownership to any bootstrapped set, including governance, access, and other rights. By airdropping u ownership.

What’s Happening In Crypto Now

Beyond this speculative post, there’s already a lot happening. So if you enjoyed I hope you’ll explore those experiments like on Zora, and Botto to others.

I’m not the expert here but following @niraj, @ritualnet, @ai, and others will go a long way if you found this interesting.

Either way, at Common, we’ll have some more experiments in this area soon.

This article was first created and posted in Common. You can check out and comment on the original post here.