AI agents are “a meme right now,” according to LIFT Network Co-Founder Ben Beath. But the majority of them are overhyped “wrappers of existing services.”
LIFT Network is aiming to change that, with the launch of AI Machines – blockchain-powered AI agents that can analyze and act on real-time data streams.
Beath showed Decrypt an example of an AI agent trained to watch English Premier League soccer matches, extracting insights from video in real-time.
“You have a node that is actually watching the content,” Beath said, explaining that it watches the video feed and breaks it up into fragments, which are then sent to nodes for processing. Those nodes then return that data, and the first to respond will receive a reward, with its response being “stitched back” into the data feed. Those insights range from understanding the somewhat-impenetrable offside rule, to spotting corporate logos on the advertising hoardings around the pitch.
LIFT reduces the cost of extracting real-time data from live content from about 60 cents per minute of streaming video to about one cent per minute, said Beath. That, he explained, “opens up a whole new range of things you can do.”
Brands could use LIFT to track their online reputation across “hundreds of hours of content” for a few dollars, he explained. “That’s essentially a digital employee that can watch anything that’s relevant to your brand online.” Crypto degens can turn prediction markets into “real-time experiences where the decisioning is done at scale based on what everyone has seen in the video.”
Gaming “continues to be a really strong vertical” for LIFT, thanks to SDK integrations with Unity and Unreal Engine, enabling users to “plug those into your game and collect real-time analytics from every player session.”
There’s DataGold in them thar hills
AI Machines operators will receive DataGold points in exchange for running the programmatic workers. “Our view is that the airdrop has run its course in the last year,” said Beath, “so we’re actually giving people an airdrop token that is tradable, transferable—you’ll be able to do whatever you want with it.” He explained that the mechanic will enable LIFT to “build community early and identify who’s for real, and who’s not.”
Also coming online shortly is LIFT’s DataBridge, a Chrome extension that enables anyone to stream content directly into the network for analysis from their browser. Following that, Beath said, LIFT will enable users to tokenize the AI models that they create using the network. “Your model is owned by your wallet,” he explained, adding that users will be able to “share not just the ownership, but also the rewards with anyone that you choose to.”
The “Canva of AI agents”
LIFT’s ambition, Beath said, is to become the “Canva of AI agents,” enabling users to spin up an AI agent in short order without requiring the skillset of a data scientist. “Our early testing suggests that we’ve made it pretty easy,” he said, adding that creating a simple agent takes ten minutes, with models featuring “a lot of data sets and complexity” taking up to an hour.
Ultimately, he said, users could reap the benefits of creating AI agents on the platform. “If you create the agent that can turn football stats into meaningful data, or can turn a DEX screener into an accurate charting tool, you’re participating in a marketplace where potentially hundreds or thousands of people—including some enterprises—will want to use your agent and pay you for it,” he explained.
“If we’re successful with the vision we have for LIFT Studio,” Beath said, “we’re going to have some of that excitement that people have around AI agents—but underpinned with genuine utility.”
