Reflecting on it, @SaharaLabsAI should be one of the few projects we wanted to invest in but didn't over the past two years.

The reason we wanted to invest in the first half of last year was simple - after discussing a whole bunch of data annotation projects for 23-24, we ultimately didn't take action because they were basically all kinds of Gamefi's "Annotate to Earn" series, which are really hard to cold start. On the other hand, Sahara's data annotation is one of the few projects that has real clients and real revenue in Web2, with clients like Microsoft and Amazon.

However, at the beginning of 25, I was a bit worried about Sahara because the importance of traditional labor-intensive data annotation has declined, especially after the release of DeepSeek R1, which changed the way data annotation works.

Firstly, many new generation large models use RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), which requires "a small amount of high-quality data" rather than "massive annotations". In other words, you need a small number of experts in a field to help AI grow, rather than a large group of ordinary people helping AI identify data.

Secondly, for pure RL (Pure Reinforcement Learning) models like Deepseek R1, even "a small amount of high-quality data" is not really needed; it only requires an initial corpus data set, and the rest is entirely based on reward functions for self-play or synthetic data to continuously evolve and fine-tune.

So at the beginning of the year, I paid attention to Sahara's updates again and was pleased to find that they didn't just stick to the data annotation track, but rather extended several business lines around the core of data.

Sahara Data: Decentralized Data Marketplace

Sahara Knowledge Agent: Personalized AI Agent

Sahara AI Marketplace: AI Asset Trading Platform

Sahara Blockchain: AI Public Chain Layer 1

In this way, both the narrative and the business model make much more sense, encompassing both Web2 and Web3. Creating a chain aligns well with the split logic mentioned by @thecryptoskanda, and currently, within the Crypto circle, this niche of "pure AI Layer 1" is somewhat blank, or in other words, lacks a leader -

Near? - This cannot be considered a pure AI Layer 1.

Vana? - This is Layer 1 but more like a pure data chain.

Bittensor? - This can be counted, but Bittensor is somewhat like BTC's POW, making it a "POW AI Layer 1" leader.

SaharaAI - has the potential to occupy the leader position in the "POS AI Layer 1" track.

So this time, at @buidlpad's ICO, those with the conditions can choose to participate, although it's not cheap, the potential leader in the AI Layer 1 big track is unlikely to stay at this valuation in the long run.