The metaverse awaits your avatar. (Source: Althea)

The Metaverse of Avatars Combined with NFTs Excites Investors

This might not be the easiest article to understand. It is filled with references to the “metaverse.” And frankly, a lot like AI overall, it would be a stretch to say we understand what the metaverse is about to become. It is an online world that will allow you to present yourself as an avatar and you will be able to cross various platforms as this avatar. As we said, this is a bit difficult to explain or totally understand. Oh, and it’s all about NFTs or non-fungible tokens.

Alethea AI is the latest head-turner in high tech.

The metaverse is going to be a very big thing so let’s explore what it is. From an article in fastcompany.com, we found this explanation:

A recent study from Squarespace and The Harris Poll found that 60% of Gen Z and 62% of Millennials believe how you present yourself online is more important than how you do so in real life. While traditional social media and websites are still used in the majority, metaverse platforms are increasingly becoming engrained in the mainstream, creating a boom in avatar creations and marketplaces to outfit your digital self.

It sounds a lot like the once-popular “Second Life” that was all the rage for a while. Linden Lab, the 2003 creator of the multiplayer world, declined to give current numbers, but in 2013 Second Life reported more than one million monthly users. More recent numbers from 2018 show that number has dropped significantly, to around half a million active monthly users.

Well, make way for the metaverse of dollars says billionaire Mark Cuban. In an article this week Cuban said:

“It’s a way of giving not only a personality to an avatar but to apply interactivity and to make it extensible,” Cuban said in an email to Fast Company. “You can take Alethea AI and let it grow into almost anything.” One of these NFTs, called “Alice,” already sold for $478,000 on Sotheby’s Natively Digital market in June.

NFTs and You

Some of the best-known NFTs are unique avatars that people buy and sell, such as those in the CyberPunks series or Bored Ape Yacht Club. But NFTs don’t do much. Now, Alethea AI, a new company backed by entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, is wrapping avatars in AI that animates them, giving them conversation skills and knowledge.

Collectively, the company calls this the avatar’s “pod” or “soul,” Alethea CEO Arif Khan tells me. Then, these intelligent NFTs, or iNFTs, become something like chatbots that can be owned, trained, or sold. Khan says his company originally used OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language model to give the NFTs their speech and intelligence, but now uses an AI model it developed in-house.

Yes, you can buy yourself a soul. Starting on October 14, people can bring their NFT avatars to Alethea’s new “Noah’s Ark” site, where the “soul” can be added. Khan says that the AI intelligence layer is contained in a new NFT that then binds with the avatar’s original NFT. Or, you can build your own intelligent NFT–or iNFT–starting from a number of templates.

So it depends on what stage of life you are in perhaps? If you are at Cuban’s stage, you see this as a fantastic money-making opportunity. Sure the tech is great and he will have a great avatar, but it is going to be an investment first and foremost. Cuban, along with Metapurse, Crypto.com Capital, Multicoin, Dapper Labs and others participated in a private sale of crypto tokens in Alethea that generated $16 million.

Alethea AI Sample of the Metaverse

There are a lot of links in the fastcompany.com article link below, that will allow you to better understand what the metaverse is, how it affects your life if at all.

And understanding crypto coins, NFTs, and the metaverse is the future that has already arrived thanks to the real world that AI is building in real life.

read more at fastcompany.com